1. Charles Baudelaire, "De l'essence du rire," in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marcel Ruff (Paris, 1968), p. 372: "le comique est un des plus clairs signes sataniques de l'homme et un des nombreux pépins contenus dans la pomme symbolique." Baudelaire also very acutely observes that "laughter is the expression of a double or contradictory sentiment, and for that reason it is convulsive" (p. 374, my italics).

2. The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed., general editor Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). All future citations from Chaucer's works will be from this edition, which revises F. N. Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2d rev. ed. (Boston, 1957). Capital letters preceding verse numbers in my citations refer to the groupings of tales or "fragments" as reordered by modern scholars and used by the Chaucer Society.

3. James Hastings, A Dictionary of the Bible, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1899), vol. 2, p. 44, summarizes the character of the fool as depicted in Proverbs: "While wisdom consists primarily in circumspect behavior, self-control, self-restraint, and teachableness, the fool is he who lets his undisciplined nature have free play--the self-reliant, self-pleased, arrogant, indocile, hasty with words, contentious, envious, quick to anger, intemperate, credulous, sluggish, given to pursuit of vain things, unable to conceal his own folly and shame."

4. Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, 1951), p. 159.

5. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London, 1944); Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973); Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 10 (1909): Two Case Histories [for "Little Hans"] and Vol. 21 (1927-1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works, trans. James continue

Strachey et al. (London, 1955, 1961); Melanie Klein, The Psycho-analysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey, 5th ed. (London, 1954), and "La Personification dans le jeu des enfants" and "Les Situations d'angoisse de l'enfant et leur reflet dans une oeuvre d'art et dans l'élan créateur," in Essais de psychanalyse (1921-1945), trans. M. Derrida (Paris, 1984); Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood, trans. C. Gattegno and F. M. Hodgson (London, 1951).

6. Freud, The Standard Edition . Vol. 8 (1905): Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey et al. (London, 1960), pp. 165-80.

1. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols. (Paris, 1965-1970), vol. 1, p. 169, verse 5507, "cui Jupiter coupa les couilles," and pp. 174-76, verses 566-723 for the debate between Reason and the Lover over Reason's indiscretion.

2. The Oxford English Dictionary defines trough as a "narrow open box-like vessel, of V-shaped or curved section." In the ninth century a trough could designate a "small primitive boat . . . hollowed out of a solid block of wood." Tub was a general term, but it could also specify a round, flat-bottomed wooden vessel made with staves and hoops (OED). A kim(e)lin also seems to have been a round, shallow basin (from Medieval Latin ciminile, "hand-washing basin"). See the Middle English Dictionary, ed. H. Kurath and S. Kuhn (Ann Arbor, 1952-).

3. Joseph Baird, "The Devil's Privetee," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70 (1969): 104; Roy Peter Clark, "Christmas Games in Chaucer's The Miller's Tale," Studies in Short Fiction 13 (1976): 285; Paula Neuss, " Double-Entendre in The Miller's Tale," Essays in Criticism 24 (1974): 331. See also Thomas W. Ross's note on pryvetee in his edition of the "Miller's Tale" for A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer . Vol. 2: The Canterbury Tales, part 3 (Norman, Okla., 1983), p. 126.

4. See Benson, Riverside Chaucer, p. 654 for "Gentilesse," and p. 120, D 1109-76, for the hag's lecture on gentility in the "Wife of Bath's Tale."

5. "Nun's Priest's Tale," B ² 4630-33:

Taketh the moralite, goode men.
For Seint Paul seith that al that writen is,
To oure doctrine it is ywrite, ywis;
Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille.

The author of the twelfth-century romance of Partonopeu de Blois (ed. Joseph Gildea, 2 vols. [Villanova, 1967-1968]) also quotes St. Paul to the effect that everything is morally instructive if interpreted the right way: break

Sains Pols, li maistre de la gent,
Nos dist en son ensegnement

Que quanqu'est es livres escrit
Tot i est por nostre porfit
Et por nos en bien doctriner
Que saçons vices eschiver.
Il dist raison et bien et voir,
Et parfont et repus savoir,
Car nus escris n'est si frarins,
Nes des fables as Sarrasins,
Dont on ne puist exemple traire
De mal laissier et de bien faire.
(vol. 1, pp. 4-5, verses 95-106)

St. Paul, the people's teacher, / tells us in his instruction / that everything written in books / is there for our profit / and to teach us about good, / so that we know how to avoid vices. / He states right reason, both good and true, / and profound and hidden wisdom; / for no writing is so worthless, / even the fictions of the Saracens, / that one cannot draw a lesson from it: / to abandon evil and to do good.

From this argument, it follows that bawdiness is in the eye of the beholder:

Fox hom ne puet nul sens trover
Fors le gros sens c'on puet taster;
Li sages de quanqu'a sos ciel
Trait sens, com ex trait d'erbe miel.
(vol. 1, p. 5, verses 117-20)

A foolish [sinful] man is able to find no sense / except the crude [sensual, material] sense that can be touched. / From everything under the heavens, the wise man / extracts [abstract or moral] sense, like [a bee] extracting honey from grasses.

Such reasoning can be a double-edged razor, as Jean de Meun, the Archpriest of Hita, Chaucer, and many other medieval writer-interpreters playfully demonstrated. For example, the late-thirteenth-century jongleur Gautier Le Leu, author of some of the most obscene and sacrilegious surviving fabliaux, teases his audience in the opening lines of his "conte" Du Con ("On Cunt") (ed. Charles H. Livingston, Le Jongleur Gautier Le Leu [Cambridge, Mass., 1951]) by repeating, through a foolish jongleuresque persona, a version of the old maxim concerning interpretation, that bawdiness is in the eye of the beholder, not in the text itself: break

Mais ge n'en sai chanter ne lire
Ne les malvais des bons eslire.

Se vos volez estre en silance
Et de parler en abstinence,
Ge vos dirai ençois la nuit,
Conment qu'il me griet ne ennuit,
Ce conte du plus halt estoire
Qui onques fust mis en memoire.
            (pp. 238-39, verses 1-28)

Gautier Le Leu says it as a motto / that in no way should a man / show his work in an immoral place. / He is very foolish who discovers it / to gross peasants and to the vulgar-minded, / . . . / so say the Roman authorities. / But I know nothing about singing nor reciting / nor distinguishing the bad places from the good. / . . . / If you will be silent / and abstain from talking, / I will tell you tonight, / no matter how much it burdens and bores me, / this account of the most noble history / ever committed to memory.

6. B. J. Whiting, Chaucer's Use of Proverbs (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), p. 84.

7. On Chaucer's use of these words, see Edward Costigan, "'Privitee' in The Canterbury Tales, " Studies in English Literature 60 (1983): 217-30.

8. See George Boas, Essays on Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (1948; rpt. New York, 1966), pp. 123-24, for an English translation of St. Bernard's exegesis of Eve's sin as intellectual curiosity. Bernard makes much of the double meaning of the Latin word sapere as "to taste" and "to know." The passage is from his De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae (J. P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus. . . . Series latina, 221 vols. [Paris, 1844-1864], vol. 182, col. 958).

9. A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1978), vol. 2, p. 429.

10. On Joseph's depiction in Nativity scenes and the textual sources for changes in his image, see Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman, 2 vols. (Greenwich, Conn., 1971), vol. 1, pp. 72-73.

11. These burlesques are treated by Heiko Jürgens, Pompa diaboli: Die lateinischen Kirchenväter und das antike Theater (Stuttgart, 1972), p. 234.

12. Genesis 9:22, 24-25: "And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. . . . And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, 'Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren.'"

13. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York, 1983).

14. See the section "Frontal and Profile as Symbolic Forms," in Meyer continue

Schapiro's Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague, 1973), pp. 37-49.

15. In "Wit and Mystery: A Revaluation in Mediaeval Latin Hymnody," Speculum 22 (1947): 316-18, Walter Ong notes similar examples of serious wordplay in medieval hymns and theological writings on the subject of the Incarnation of the Word.

16. Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, p. 1.

17. Steinberg attributes the veil-as-improvised-loincloth motif to medieval artists' attempts to depict pious Franciscan texts such as the late-thirteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ attributed incorrectly to St. Bonaventure. According to the Meditations, after washing the newborn Christ in the milk of her breasts, Mary wrapped him in the veil from her head. (See the edition and translation of the Meditations by Isa Ragusa and Rosalie Green [Princeton, 1961], p. 33.) Mid-fourteenth-century artists invented a second veil for Mary, a diaphanous underveil, for didactic purposes that went far beyond the pseudo-Bonaventure's commonsensical imagining that the Madonna's head veil (hardly gossamer!) was the best cloth at hand for swaddling. Later contemplatives from more northern climates imagined an even more humble (and warmer) impromptu swaddling material--Joseph's woolen stockings. For this fifteenth-century motif in art, see Schiller, Iconography, vol. 1, p. 80.

18. On the symbolism of Christ's Circumcision, see Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, pp. 50-65 and excursus 26, "The Blood Hyphen."

19. Ibid., pp. 96-108, and excursus 37, "The Un-dead Hand on the Groin."

18. On the symbolism of Christ's Circumcision, see Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, pp. 50-65 and excursus 26, "The Blood Hyphen."

19. Ibid., pp. 96-108, and excursus 37, "The Un-dead Hand on the Groin."

20. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, Ind., 1984).

21. Versions of the Cena Cypriani are discussed by Paul Lehmann in Die Parodie im Mittelalter, 2d ed. (Stuttgart, 1963), pp. 12-16, and by Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 286-89.

22. For aspects of biblical parody in the "Miller's Tale," see the following essays: Paul Beichner, "Absolon's Hair," Medieval Studies 12 (1951): 222-33; Kelsie Harder, "Chaucer's Use of the Mystery Plays in the Miller's Tale, " Modern Language Quarterly 17 (1956): 193-98; Robert Kaske, "The Canticum Canticorum in the Miller's Tale, " Studies in Philology 59 (1962): 479-500; Edmund Reiss, ''Daun Gerveys in the Miller's Tale, " Papers on Language and Literature 6 (1970): 115-24; James Wimsatt, "Chaucer and the Canticle of Canticles," in Chaucer the Love Poet, ed. Jerome Mitchell and William Provost (Athens, Ga., 1973), pp. 66-90; Beryl Rowland, "The Play of the Miller's Tale: A Game within a Game," Chaucer Review 5 (1970-1971): 140-46, and "Chaucer's Blasphemous Churl: A New Interpretation of the Miller's Tale, " in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. Beryl Rowland continue

(Kent, Ohio, 1974), pp. 43-55; Clark, "Christmas Games in Chaucer's The Miller's Tale ."

23. On Joseph as Synagogue, see Schiller, Iconography, vol. 1, pp. 72-73 and accompanying figures.

24. Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, p. 14.

25. Schiller, Iconography, vol. 1, p. 78; Henrik Cornell, The Iconography of the Nativity of Christ (Uppsala, 1924), p. 12.

26. Ragusa and Green, eds., Meditations, p. 32.

27. Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse (Bloomington, Ind., 1976), pp. 96, 99. See also Carl Lindahl, "The Festive Form of the Canterbury Tales, " ELH 52 (1985): 531-74. I disagree with Lindahl's otherwise excellent essay for its too easy equation of gentles' or churls' festivals with actual social status or origins.

28. See Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman (orig. pub. 1924; London, 1965), pp. 163-64, for analysis of the medieval comic rendition of St. Joseph. Rowland, in "The Play of the Miller's Tale, " lists English dramatic portrayals of St. Joseph.

1. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman (orig. pub. 1924; London, 1965), pp. 163, 151, 153, 154.

2. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, Ind., 1984), p. 316, reminds us that the size and shape of the nose represented the size and shape of the penis in the medieval popular imagination. For literary and "scientific" treatments of this relationship, see Alfred David, "An Iconography of Noses: Directions in the History of a Physical Stereotype," in Mapping the Cosmos, ed. Jane Chance and R. O. Wells, Jr. (Houston, 1985), pp. 76-97.

3. The quotation from Byron is edited and anthologized by Derek Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London, 1978), vol. 1, p. 249.

4. Ibid., p. 167.

3. The quotation from Byron is edited and anthologized by Derek Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London, 1978), vol. 1, p. 249.

4. Ibid., p. 167.

5. This may help to explain why art historians, until Steinberg, have ignored the Christ Child's exposed phallus in late medieval and Renaissance paintings.

6. Lydgate in Brewer, Chaucer, vol. 1, p. 50. Hoccleve, ibid., p. 63. Caxton, ibid., p. 75. In the Harley manuscript (London, B.L. 4866, fol. 88r) of Hoccleve's Regement of Princes, Chaucer's famous half-length portrait functions as a nota sign. In medieval manuscripts, disembodied hands with pointing index fingers frequently gloss and mark sententious or proverbial passages. Chaucer's extended index finger points to Hoc- soft

cleve's lines about Chaucer's own "fructuous entendement," his capacity as a serious interpreter. The Harley illuminator cleverly presents an image of Chaucer doing precisely what Hoccleve praises him for: pointing out the pithy, noteworthy statement. This pointing finger and the pointel (writing tool) hanging around Chaucer's neck in the Harley portrait represent Chaucer's interpretive abilities as a writer.

7. See Paull Baum, "Chaucer's Puns," Publications of the Modern Language Association 71 (1956): 225, for a brief history of early discoveries of puns in Chaucer's work and for the first citation from Lounsbury; the second is from Brewer, Chaucer, vol. 2, p. 230.

8. F. N. Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2d rev. ed. (Boston, 1957), p. 658, n. 297.

9. Larry D. Benson, "The 'Queynte' Punnings of Chaucer's Critics," in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, No. 1: Reconstructing Chaucer, ed. Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville, 1985), pp. 23-47.

10. D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, 1962), pp. 20-22.

11. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York, 1983), pp. 147-54. By means of a false gesture, Carlo Crivelli burlesques this contemporary iconography of revelation as striptease: his Virgin very delicately lifts a diaphanous veil from the Christ's Child's back . Many other aspects of this painting, the late-fifteenth-century Demidoff altarpiece in the National Gallery of London, confirm Crivelli's burlesque intention.

12. In "The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg," Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986): 399-439, Caroline Walker Bynum argues that "medieval people" would not think of sexuality in viewing the Christ Child's bare phallus or Mary's nude breast in religious art:

There is reason to think that medieval viewers saw bared breasts (at least in painting and sculpture) not primarily as sexual but as the food with which they were iconographically associated. . . . There is also reason to think that medieval people saw Christ's penis not primarily as a sexual organ but as the object of circumcision and therefore as the wounded, bleeding flesh with which it was associated in painting and in text. . . . I am not here denying that medieval people saw a penis when they saw Christ's penis. Moreover, as I shall demonstrate below, they sometimes saw a breast (or a womb) when they saw Christ's side. But they probably did not associate either penis or breast primarily with sexual activity.
(pp. 408-9)

But who, precisely, is "medieval people"? Is this not a persona? In the final paragraph of her essay Bynum drops "medieval people" to assume the first person, albeit plural: break

If we want to express the significance of Jesus in both male and female images, if we want to turn from seeing body as sexual to seeing body as generative, if we want to find symbols that give dignity and meaning to the suffering we cannot eliminate and yet fear so acutely, we can find support for doing so in the art and theology of the later Middle Ages.
(p. 439)

13. English translation by Robertson ( Preface, pp. 28-29), from J. P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus. Series latina, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844-1964), vol. 79, col. 473.

14. Michael Zink, La Prédication en langue romane avant 1300 (Paris, 1976), pp. 374, 369.

15. Ibid., pp. 333-34. See also the analysis of the near-pun vie/vit toward the end of the concluding chapter of this book.

16. Ibid., p. 290; PL, 177, cols. 826-27.

14. Michael Zink, La Prédication en langue romane avant 1300 (Paris, 1976), pp. 374, 369.

15. Ibid., pp. 333-34. See also the analysis of the near-pun vie/vit toward the end of the concluding chapter of this book.

16. Ibid., p. 290; PL, 177, cols. 826-27.

14. Michael Zink, La Prédication en langue romane avant 1300 (Paris, 1976), pp. 374, 369.

15. Ibid., pp. 333-34. See also the analysis of the near-pun vie/vit toward the end of the concluding chapter of this book.

16. Ibid., p. 290; PL, 177, cols. 826-27.

17. See Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, fig. 13.

18. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis, 1958), p. 37, my italics.

19. Robert Kaske, "The Canticum Canticorum in the Miller's Tale," Studies in Philology 59 (1962): 497-500; James Wimsatt, "Chaucer and the Canticle of Canticles," in Chaucer the Love Poet, ed. Jerome Mitchell and William Provost (Athens, Ga., 1973), p. 88; Beryl Rowland, "Chaucer's Blasphemous Churl: A New Interpretation of the Miller's Tale, '' in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of Russell Hope Robbins , ed. Beryl Rowland (Kent, Ohio, 1974), p. 51; Roy Peter Clark, "Christmas Games in Chaucer's The Miller's Tale," Studies in Short Fiction 13 (1976): 281.

20. Roland Barthes, Critique et vérité (Paris, 1966), especially pp. 40-42.

21. For further discussion of this manuscript, see Paul Strohm, "Jean of Angoulême: A Fifteenth-Century Reader of Chaucer," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 72 (1971): 69-76.

22. Les Facéties de Pogge . . . accompagnées des Moralitez de Guillaume Tardif, ed. Pierre des Brandes (Paris, 1919).

23. Thus C. David Benson, in Chaucer's Drama of Style (Chapel Hill, 1986), demonstrates the deliberate stylistic variations and experimentation in Chaucer's collection of fabliaux, yet organizes his own exposition of these fabliaux into a moral hierarchy concluding with the "Merchant's Tale," which he reads as Chaucer's "most morally challenging work in the genre":

No other Canterbury tale exposes evil more relentlessly. And yet, at the same time, the fabliau repeatedly offers visions of faith and love, both human and divine, that promise hope to the reader. This disgusting and bitter tale is also a compelling advocate for the highest Christian values. . . . Not only does the Merchant's Tale differ radically from Chaucer's other fabliaux, but its unique artist is also one of the most difficult, though ultimately rewarding, Christian poets in Middle English literature.
(pp. 129-30) break

1. Ruth Hirsh Weir, Language in the Crib (The Hague, 1962), p. 121.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 18.

1. Ruth Hirsh Weir, Language in the Crib (The Hague, 1962), p. 121.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 18.

1. Ruth Hirsh Weir, Language in the Crib (The Hague, 1962), p. 121.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 18.

4. Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood, trans. C. Gattegno and F. M. Hodgson (London, 1951).

5. Boccaccio, The Decameron , trans. G. H. McWilliam (London, 1972). Subsequent citations refer to this edition.

6. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition . Vol. 8 (1905): Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey et al. (London, 1960), pp. 165-80.

7. Rosemary Bolig, "Play in Hospital Settings," in Child's Play: Developmental and Applied, ed. Thomas Yawkey and Anthony Pellegrini (Hillsdale, N.J., 1984), p. 342.

8. Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, 1951); Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages , trans. F. Hopman (orig. pub. 1924; London, 1965).

9. Thus it was for the Antonine monastery of Isenheim, which specialized in the care of syphilitics, that Matthias Grünewald was commissioned to paint his famous sixteenth-century altarpiece depicting a crucified Christ whose body is covered with suppurating syphilitic-looking sores. Gruesome as it may seem to us, such an artistic fiction was surely intended to be consolatory: "When a sufferer was brought in he was first led to the altar and prayers for miraculous healing were said. It is in the light of these pathetic and repulsive scenes that this Crucifixion must be seen" (Nikolas Pevsner and Michael Meier, Grünewald [London, 1958], p. 61).

10. Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, N. Y., 1982).

11. Cited in ibid., p. 198.

12. Cited in ibid., p. 81.

13. Ibid., p. 199.

10. Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, N. Y., 1982).

11. Cited in ibid., p. 198.

12. Cited in ibid., p. 81.

13. Ibid., p. 199.

10. Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, N. Y., 1982).

11. Cited in ibid., p. 198.

12. Cited in ibid., p. 81.

13. Ibid., p. 199.

10. Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, N. Y., 1982).

11. Cited in ibid., p. 198.

12. Cited in ibid., p. 81.

13. Ibid., p. 199.

14. For an overview of the difficulties of this period, see Charles Muscatine, Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer (Notre Dame, 1972), pp. 15-22.

15. The story of Griselda, for example, was dramatized by Philippe de Mezières for the French king, in order to reinforce the power and authority of the monarchy by teaching political submission. Through dramatic representation of a suffering heroine with whom his audience would identify, Philippe hoped to encourage the king's subjects to conform their will to their lord's, just as Griselda obeyed and identified with her husband and lord. For Philippe's play, see L'Estoire de Griseldis, ed. Barbara M. Craig (Lawrence, Kans., 1954). break

1. Quotations from Herbert Read, Art and Alienation: The Role of the Artist in Society (London, 1967), p. 64.

2. In his seminal Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (London, 1944), p. 26, Johan Huizinga defines play as (1) "a voluntary activity" that involves (2) a "stepping out of 'real life' into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all its own"; furthermore, play is (3) "disinterested," (4) "secluded and limited in time and space''; it (5) "creates order," and (6) its outcome is "tense and uncertain." Huizinga adds (p. 41) that "play possesses . . . at least one further very essential feature, namely, the consciousness, however latent, of 'only pretending.'"

3. Sigmund Freud, "Die Verneinung," Gesammelte Werke . Vol. 14: Werke aus den Jahren 1925-1931 (London, 1948), pp. 13-15.

4. For an account of the Russian formalists' explorations of "making strange," that is, of the artifices of poetry, see Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism (The Hague, 1955), especially pp. 150-51.

5. Of course, this displacement goes on even in writings that we do not generally term fictional. For example, in his 1985 Haskins Lecture for the American Council of Learned Societies, in which he was asked to put his own historical writings in perspective, Lawrence Stone pointed out that the subjects he has written about in history all have symbolic references in contemporary political and social crises or changes. In researching and writing about crises centuries ago, he was, in some respects, mastering (and helping his readers to master) anxieties about those of our own times, as Stone himself recognizes: "Although I was not aware of it at the time, I seem to have been constantly stimulated by current events into diving back into the past to discover whether similar trends and problems have occurred before, and if so how they were handled. Whether this makes for better or worse history, I do not know" ("A Life of Learning," ACLS Newsletter 36 [1985]: 21).

6. On comic mechanism, see Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (orig. pub. 1924; Paris, 1981), pp. 22-28. A translation is available in Comedy , ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore, 1956).

7. Anatole de Montaiglon and Gaston Raynaud, Recueil général . . . des fabliaux des XIII ^e et XIV ^e siècles, 6 vols. (Paris, 1872-1890), vol. 1, pp. 289-93. This edition will henceforth be referred to as MR.

8. In the French, the number, but not the gender, of the subject is indicated by the verb ending, and no pronoun is necessary. This allows the wife to conceal the sex of her "healer." I have tried to suggest this linguistic ambiguity in English translation by the composite pronoun s/he .

9. Gautier Le Leu's verse has also been edited by Charles H. Livingston in Le Jongleur Gautier Le Leu (Cambridge, Mass., 1951). break

10. For a Latin edition and French translation of Babio by Henri Laye, see Gustave Cohen, La "Comédie" latine en France au XII ^e siècle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1931), vol. 2, pp. 30-56. The argument that Latin comedies such as Babio ought to be considered fabliaux is made by Edmond Faral in "Le Fabliau latin au moyen âge," Romania 50 (1924): 321-85: "the medieval Latin tale derived from antique comic drama; abusively designated by the name of comedy, it presents, in its spirit and the nature of its subjects, the closest analogies with the fabliau, or, more precisely, is nothing else, under the deceptive cloak of academic style, but the fabliau" (p. 385). On occasions of festive reversal, both vernacular fabliaux and Latin ones such as Babio may well have been dramatized, using medieval performance methods, either in the setting of the school, with clerics playing all the roles, or in secular settings, with the likely participation of jongleurs.

11. The early part of Babio is devoted to a different kind of humiliation of the father and mockery of his authority. Babio loves his stepdaughter Viola (Petula's daughter) with a repressed passion--only to see Viola abducted by a richer and more powerful man (at the urging of everyone in the family except Babio). During the abduction, the cowardly priest stands powerlessly by, using nothing but his tongue to try to goad his wife and servant to do battle with the abductor (p. 38, lines 169-72). Later Babio laments the "violation" of Viola by another man, when he, Babio, had so carefully brought her up for his own delight (p. 39, lines 179-84).

12. On this burlesque, see Alan Levitan, "The Parody of Pentecost in Chaucer's Summoner's Tale," University of Toronto Quarterly 40 (1971): 236-46.

13. In The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago, 1986), pp. 111-13, R. Howard Bloch makes incisive comments on the closely related subject of how "the joke cuts short" and thus symbolically castrates "proper" verbal expression, which I call the "father" tongue:

If the joke depends entirely on verbal expression, is language not ultimately its proper object, or a certain assumption of verbal propriety which is displaced, lost, substituted for? . . . Like the humor of the medieval tale, the effectiveness of the joke seems always to imply an ill-tailoring of verbal expression, a violence done to words; and this right down to the level of the letter. The "joke-work" may, for instance, involve condensation with formation of a composite word. . . . The joke cuts words in unexpected places, as in the multiple use of the same word as a whole and in parts. . . . Alongside the usual cuts, condensations, and substitutions that jokes work at the level of the letter are the displacements of sense or breaks in reference which are synonymous with humor as word play.

14. MR, vol. 4, p. 46; also edited by Jean Rychner, Contribution à l'étude des fabliaux, 2 vols. (Neuchâtel, 1960), vol. 2, p. 27. Different versions of this fabliau moralize it in different ways. Whereas the version of continue

Paris, B.N. fr. 19152, fol. 62v-63r, concludes, as previously shown, with a humiliation of the king, the ending of the version of Berne, Bibliothèque de la Bourgeoisie, 354, fol. 45v, for example, turns the joke back on the peasants and away from the king:

A itant li vilains s'en part,
Toz liez s'en vint en son païs;
Si a mendé toz ses amis
E les vilains de la contree:
Male honte lor a donee.
Onques nus frans hom point n'en ot;
N'i a vilain qui ne s'en lot,
Trestuit en furent parçonier.
Por ce dit an en reprovier,
Qui fu trové par icest conte:
Que vilain aient male honte!
(Rychner, vol. 2, p. 27)

With this the rustic left; / rejoicing, he returned to his land / and sent for all of his friends / and the peasants of the area. / He gave them "Evil Shame." / No free man was without a part, / nor was there any rustic who had none of it; / all were co-proprietors. / For this reason they have a saying, / which is demonstrated by this story: / "May the rustic have evil shame!"

1. On the subject of words that the "gentils" in Chaucer's audience would probably have considered unspeakable, see Thomas W. Ross, "Taboo-Words in Fifteenth-Century English," Fifteeth-Century Studies, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, Conn., 1984), pp. 137-60.

2. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition . Vol. 8 (1905): Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey et al. (London, 1960), pp. 125-26.

3. Ellen Winner et al., "The Ontogenesis of Metaphor," in Cognition and Figurative Language, ed. R. P. Honeck and R. R. Hoffman (Hillsdale, N.J., 1980), p. 358. Moreover, some studies suggest that spontaneous production of figurative expressions, while decreasing at age six or with the child's entry into school, increases again in adolescence (a period of rebellion against authority). See Marilyn R. Pollio and James D. Pickens, "The Developmental Structure of Figurative Competence," in Cognition and Figurative Language, pp. 314-16. Other studies have shown that the humor of preschool children is largely based on playful violations--perpetrated by the child or by others in a nonserious mood--of the perceptual appearance of things, that is, on distortions of familiar sights and sounds (such as rhyming or nonsense words). This suggests that the laughter of preschool children at incongruities, at deviations from the continue

norm, may be a playful outlet for aggression and rebellion against the authority of norms, of "reality." See Paul McGhee, "Play, Incongruity, Humor," in Child's Play: Developmental and Applied, ed. Thomas Yawkey and Anthony Pellegrini (Hillsdale, N.J., 1984), pp. 229-30.

4. For descriptions of late medieval and early Renaissance festive rituals of regression (although they do not label them so), see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, Ind., 1984), and E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (London, 1903), vol. 1, especially his chapters on the Feasts of Fools, of the Boy Bishop, of the Ass, and other New Year celebrations.

5. On these genres see W. Kellermann, "Über die altfranzösischen Gedichte des uneingeschränkten Unsinns," Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen 205 (1968): 1-22; Paul Zumthor, Langue, texte, énigme (Paris, 1975), pp. 68-88; for examples, see Lambert C. Porter, La Fatrasie et le fatras: Essai sur la poésie irrationnelle en France au moyen âge (Paris, 1960), and Le Recueil Trepperel: Les sotties, ed. Eugénie Droz (Paris, 1935).

6. Charles Muscatine, in The Old French Fabliaux (New Haven, 1986), takes a similar view, that the fabliaux "seem to be responding to an outbreak of decency" (p. 133): "there is another palpable source of verbal taboo in the rapid spread, in the thirteenth century, of the courtly ethic. In showing sharply divergent responses to so-called obscene terms the fabliaux seem to be recording the impact of relatively new taboos, the mixed reception of these taboos in the fabliau period, and indeed, some opposition to them" (p. 109).

7. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, pp. 148-58, Freud reasons that we laugh at obscene or aggressive ("tendentious") jokes because the psychic energy required to repress forbidden desires is suddenly rendered unnecessary by our encounter with these very desires expressed in the joke. The "economy" of psychic energy that would ordinarily be used to repress illicit desires gives us pleasure (rather like a good bargain), and we release this surplus energy ("discharge it," according to Freud's masculine orgasmic metaphors) in laughter.

8. Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris, 1972), p. 73.

9. The Summoner shows himself to be a virtuoso at the excremental insult. Earlier, when the Friar interjected his opinion of the Wife of Bath's lengthy prologue, the Summoner ribbed the Friar by comparing him to a fly that gets into every "matter" (textual and fecal): break

"Lo," quod the Somonour, "Goddes armes two!
A frere wol entremette hym everemo.
Lo, goode men, a flye and eek a frere
Wol falle in every dyssh and eek mateere."
(D 833-36)

This is what starts the exchange of playful ripostes between the Summoner and the Friar in which each tells a fabliau aimed at making a laughingstock of his rival:

  "Ye, woltow so, sire Somonour?" quod the Frere;
"Now, by my feith I shal, er that I go,
Telle of a somonour swich a tale or two
That alle the folk shal laughen in this place."
(D 840-43)

10. For example, in the fabliau of "Berengier of the Long Asshole" ("Berengier au lonc cul," MR, vol. 3, pp. 252-62), the cowardly husband's greatest humiliation consists not so much in his cuckolding, although this too happens, but in his agreeing to kiss the anus of his conqueror, "according to the law of a cowardly, lowborn man" (p. 260). What is worse, the strange knight who conquers him with threats alone is really his wife in knightly disguise. She calls herself "Berengier au long cul," for anatomical reasons, in a burlesque of epic epithets. In this fabliau, as in Chaucer's "Miller's Tale,'' a kiss bestowed on the lower orifice, instead of on the mouth, puts woman "on top" in a grotesque parody of the ceremony of vassalage.

11. Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux, p. 115, also signals this punning play: "The author of one version of 'Les Quatre Sohais Saint Martin' is so pleased with the pun on connue (known/'cunt-ed') that within a few dozen verses he elaborately repeats it."

12. For an edition of and commentary on this text, see Omer Jodogne, " Audigier et la chanson de geste," Le Moyen Age 15 (1960): 495-526.

13. Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux, p. 145, notes that "the author capitalizes on the fact that the word vit in Old French . . . has a number of common and harmless homonyms." Vis ("face") is another possible harmless interpretation of the same syllable, pronounced with emphasis on the first consonant and the vowel sounds.

14. For example, Gautier de Coinci, in his Miracles de Nostre Dame (ed. V. Frédéric Koenig, 4 vols. [Paris, 1955-1970]), uses the figure of the nut to signify the deeper meaning of the Scriptures, which many men boastful of their learning never penetrate, because they are content to gnaw the shell: break

Mout se vantent de letreüre,
Mais n'entendent de l'Escriture
Ne l'efficace ne la force.
De la nois vont runjant l'escorce,
Mais ne sevent qu'il a dedens.
(vol. 2, pp. 13-14, verses 213-17)

They boast a great deal of their learning / but do not understand from Scripture / either the means or the meaning. / They gnaw the nutshell / but do not know what lies within.

15. In "Modes of Signification and the Humor of Obscene Diction in the Fabliaux," The Humor of the Fabliaux, ed. Thomas Cooke and Benjamin Honeycutt (Columbia, Miss., 1974), p. 183, Roy Pearcy discovers a sudden shift of linguistic registers in many fabliaux "at the moment of peripety, when the dupe suffers a sudden reversal of fortune and when the illusions he has trusted are dispelled in a sudden outburst of accumulated obscenities that are in contrast to earlier euphemisms."

16. Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols. (Paris, 1965-1970), vol. 1, p. 217, verses 7076-85.

17. Pearcy, "Modes of Signification," pp. 190-91, rightly reads the ending of this fabliau, with its delivery of "bran" instead of "avainne" (chaff--or worse--instead of grain), as a deliberately mocking subversion of the procedure of allegorization, which is here closely connected to the courteous euphemism, "a means . . . of distancing the [lovers'] discussion of their sexual relationship from its true nature.''

18. Larry D. Benson, "The 'Queynte' Punnings of Chaucer's Critics," in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, No. 1: Reconstructing Chaucer, ed. Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville, 1985), p. 30.

19. Berne, ms. 354, fol. 78; ed. Jean Rychner, in Contribution à l'étude des fabliaux, 2 vols. (Neuchâtel, 1960), vol. 2, p. 81.

20. Benson, "The 'Queynte' Punnings," p. 40.

21. Beryl Rowland, "The Play of the Miller's Tale: A Game within a Game," Chaucer Review 5 (1970-71) : 144.

22. Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, Eng., 1973). Indeed, Mann goes much further, arguing that "all these ambiguities, together with the 'omission of the victim' and the confusion of moral and emotional reactions, add up to Chaucer's consistent removal of the possibility of moral judgement " (p. 197).

1. Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux (Copenhagen, 1957), p. 70, for example: "The difference between the fabliau and the courtly tale is that which separates a sublime genre from its burlesque caricature." Nykrog argues that the fabliaux are an aristocratic genre because no one else "could dare to make fun of an aristocratic genre [the courtly tale] by discussing vulgar problems courteously" (p. 95).

2. For Philippe de Beaumanoir's sequence of eleven fatrasies, see the continue

edition of Lambert C. Porter in La Fatrasie et le fatras: Essai sur la poésie irrationnelle en France au moyen âge (Paris, 1960), pp. 142-44.

3. Charles H. Livingston, Le Jongleur Gautier Le Leu (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), pp. 96-97.

4. For evidence of Rabanus Maurus's ninth-century version of the Cena Cypriani, see his letter of presentation to Lothar II in Hrabani (Mauri) Epistolae, no. 52 in Monumenta Germania Historica, Epistolarum tomi V pars prior. Karolini Aevi III, ed. E. Dümmler et al. (Berlin, 1899), p. 506; for an edition of Neckam's verses praising wine, see M. Esposito, "On Some Unpublished Poems Attributed to Alexander Neckam," English Historical Review 30 (1915): 450-71; for Philippe de Beaumanoir's fatrasies see Porter, La Fatrasie; for Eustache Deschamps's facetious verses see Le Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire and Gaston Raynaud, Oeuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps, 11 vols. (Paris, 1878-1903), vol. 7, pp. 155-92, 312-62; and on Molinet and the rhétoriqueurs see Paul Zumthor, "From Hi(story) to Poem, or the Paths of Pun: The Grands Rhétoriqueurs of Fifteenth-Century France," trans. A. and E. Tomarken, New Literary History 10 (1978-1979): 231-63.

5. Whether in the sense of rape, abduction, or forced marriage, raptus was a crime against the authority of the "fathers," first and foremost the woman's own father or the male protector who had the right to bestow her on another man, and second against the paternal authority of civic and ecclesiastical institutions that enforced law, order, and Christian morality. This is demonstrated in a case of raptus in Paris in 1405 for which there are full records. The nobleman Regnault d'Azincourt, with his male relatives and a priest, entered by night the house of a wealthy bourgeois grocer in the rue St. Denis. With the priest as witness, it was Regnault's intention to engage himself to the coquettish widow against the will of her father, who had previously vowed that he would prefer to pay the taille weekly than have his daughters taken from him by noblemen. Regnault's plan failed (because the lady fainted), but he still had to face the judgment and penalties of civil and ecclesiastical authorities. For the documents relating to this trial, see Antoine le Roux de Lincy, "Tentative de rapt commise par Regnault d'Azincourt sur une épicière de la rue Saint-Denis en 1405," Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Chartes, 2d sér., 3 (1846): 316-33.

Although it is extremely risky to speculate about the personal motivation of Chaucer's fictions or the private purposes they may have served, it is nevertheless reasonable to assume that Chaucer, like other writers before and after him, used his fiction as therapy and also, in some cases, to persuade under cover of game. The House of Fame is particularly evocative in these respects. Chaucer's friends witnessed to his good "reputa- soft

tion" and Cecily Chaumpaigne released him from charges of raptus in 1380, during Chaucer's period as collector of customs, when he is believed to have written The House of Fame, partly because of his allusion therein to his "rekenynges" (book 2, verse 653). Chaucer's equivocating discussion of the different causes and meanings of dreams and his claim not to know the meaning or cause of this one clouds the waters so as not to be too obvious. Nevertheless, Chaucer's "dream" fiction will "turne . . . to goode" only if we understand it as a self-defense and are amused and persuaded by it. If we misunderstand it through willfully ''malicious entencion," Chaucer prays that we will come to harm (book 1, verses 94-108). The first dream sequence of The House of Fame dwells on the story of Aeneas and Dido, who willingly gave her love to Aeneas and suffered from "wikke Fame" for her misjudgment, that is, for giving herself to a family man with another mission in life. Chaucer's sympathies in his narration of the love affair lie entirely with Dido, "that loved al to sone a gest" (book 1, verse 288); nevertheless, it is not difficult to see that she is carried away by Aeneas's stories of his adventures and his appearance (book 1, verses 253-64). With reference to Chaucer and Cecily, such a "dream" may be self-serving, for the lesson the classical story teaches is that men are not always faithful, especially when they are ambitious, and women are not always taken against their will.

In the second book of The House of Fame, Chaucer attacks the problem of absolving himself from another direction. He debunks the notion that he could possibly have carried any woman off by force. Here, it is the timorous, hermitlike Geoffrey who suffers raptus by an eagle that finds him, probably for his rotundity, "noyous for to carye" (book 2, verse 574). Chaucer is not, however, the object of Jove's desire, a second Ganymede, as he first imagines; instead, his enlèvement to the House of Fame is a reward for his diligence at poetry and reading, that is, for the reclusive life he has led for so long, oblivious even to his closest neighbors' doings (book 2, verses 614-60). The third book treats the issue of reputation, which, as Geoffrey discovers in the palace of Fame, is totally arbitrary and unstable, as is the report that issues from the whirling rumor mill. Where truth lies in the relationship between words and deeds is impossible to tell, and the vision breaks off before Geoffrey meets the person who "semed for to be / A man of gret auctorite" (book 3, verses 2157-58). The conclusion we may be meant to draw from The House of Fame is that we had better not believe any rumors defaming Geoffrey Chaucer and blackening his reputation for the raptus of Cecily Chaumpaigne.

6. If Harry Bailly is miming politesse, he may be using a French expression. In his Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française (10 vols. [Paris, 1880-1902]), Frédéric Godefroy gives examples before 1350 of gentillesse continue

used as a term of honorable address, more commonly in the plural to designate a group of gentlemen, but also in the singular to designate a ruler, as in the following instance (vol. 4, p. 262): "'Honneur a vostre gentillesse, / Roy renommé par dessus tous' ( Viel Testament, 29190, A.T.)." On the courteous "youre," see Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse (Bloomington, Ind., 1976), p. 186.

7. Larry D. Benson, "The 'Queynte' Punnings of Chaucer's Critics," in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, No. 1: Reconstructing Chaucer, ed. Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville, 1985), pp. 23-47.

8. Alan Gaylord, " Sentence and solaas in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales: Harry Bailly as Horseback Editor," PMLA 82 (1967): 232.

9. On festive gender reversal and playful female dominance, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975); for images of "Mère Folle," see Claude Gaignebet and J. Dominique Lajoux, L'Art profane et religion populaire au moyen âge (Paris, 1985), pp. 187-88.

10. On the use of garlands in popular medieval agricultural festivals, as well as offerings of cakes, see E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1903), vol. 1, pp. 116-20, 142-43.

11. Benson, Riverside Chaucer, p. 863: "Of the thirty-five MSS in which the Epilogue to the Man of Law's Tale appears, six read 'Sommonour/Sompnour,' twenty-eight 'Squier,' and one (the late Selden) 'Shipman,' which most editors have taken as the most probable reading. All three readings, however, are most likely scribal inventions."

12. Carl Lindahl, "The Festive Form of the Canterbury Tales, " ELH 52 (1985): 548.

13. On the customs of charivari in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance in England and France, see E. P. Thompson, "Rough Music: Le Charivari anglais," Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 27 (1972): 285-312; the excellent collection of articles in Actes de la table ronde organisée à Paris (25-27 avril 1977) par l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales et le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, ed. J. Le Goff and J. C. Schmitt (La Haye, 1981); and Henri Rey-Flaud, Le Charivari: Les Rituels fondamentaux de la sexualité (Paris, 1985).

14. Donald Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), pp. 48-49.

15. See the chapter on Eustache Deschamps in my unpublished doctoral dissertation, "Criticism of the Ruler, 1100-1400, in Provençal, Old French, and Middle English Verse," Columbia, 1978.

1. Peter Weidkuhn, "Le Carnaval de Bâle ou l'histoire inversée," in Les Grandes Traditions de la fête, ed. G. S. Métraux (Paris, 1976), p. 40, continue

fig. 7. On the use of festive personae to express satire and criticism and to license rebellious political actions in the Renaissance, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule" and "Women on Top" in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975).

2. The discussion of taboo topics puts great pressure on scholarly writers to adopt comic masks in their prefaces and epilogues. An extreme example of this is Gustave Witkowski's L'Art chrétien, ses licences (Paris, 1912), which he frames with a self-mockingly philosophical preface beginning "The Ego is detestable" and ends with a facetious, black-bordered announcement of his own demise.

3. A version of the first chapter of this book was given as a talk for the Chaucer Division of the Modern Language Association, 29 December 1985, in Chicago.

4. Melanie Klein, "La Personnification dans le jeu des enfants," Essais de psychanalyse (1921-1945), trans. M. Derrida (Paris, 1984), pp. 243-51.

5. G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), pp. 154-55. R. M. Lumiansky quotes this passage in the introduction to Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales (Austin, 1955), pp. 5-6, and proceeds on the same assumptions as Kittredge concerning the realism of Chaucer's use of dramatic conventions.

6. Donald Howard, in The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), calls attention to this layering of voices:

[Chaucer] places over his mask of the fool the masks of the pilgrims which he has displayed before us in the General Prologue. Yet each of these pilgrims whose roles he plays is himself a performer who plays the roles of various figures in his own tale. (In some instances the figures in a tale are performers too: Chauntecleer performs two tales, complete with characters, plot, and dialogues.) We have therefore a performer playing the parts of performers.
(p. 195)

7. For some of the authenticating conventions of medieval historical narrative, see Jeanette Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages (Geneva, 1981). Guido delle Colonne's Latin-prose Historia destructionis Troiae has been edited by Nathaniel Griffin (Cambridge, Mass., 1936) and translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Bloomington, Ind., 1974). See Leopold Constans's edition of Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie, 6 vols. (Paris, 1904-1912).

8. Guido, Historia, trans. Meek, book 9, p. 86: "It was the time when winter had already shed its frost, and its cold was dispelled on account of the season. . . . The sun was running in the last stages of Pisces . . . and the month of March which was to follow was already near. At this time the whole Greek army, well supplied with a large fleet, had assembled in the port of the city of Athens."

9. V. L. Dedeck-Héry, "Boethius' De Consolatione by Jean de Meun," continue

Mediaeval Studies 14 (1952): 168, lines 10-18. In Chaucer's Narrators (London, 1985), p. 102, David Lawton argues that Chaucer is presenting himself in the apology of his "General Prologue" as a transcriber; Lawton then, rather too hastily, equates transcription with translation: "the narrator as poet presents his transcription of the pilgrim's pretended experience as an act of translation (730-6), a task no different from that of Troilus . All writing, so apprehended, is indeed a matter of 'translating an invisible text.' The author's apology centres primarily on style. . . . The true reporter, in seeking to translate 'pleynly,' must reproduce others' words 'proprely': the theory is conventional and it is one of stylistic decorum." No sources of this "conventional" theory are cited.

10. Constans, ed., Roman de Troie, vol. 1, p. 9, verses 135-40.

11. On the practice of late medieval historians, see Bernard Guenée, "L'historien par les mots," in his Politique et histoire au moyen âge (Paris, 1981), pp. 221-37.

12. Howard, The Idea, p. 143, has called attention to "this fictional tour de force of memory."

13. Jean Froissart, Chroniques, ed. J. A. Buchon, 16 vols. (Paris, 1824-1829), vol. 9, p. 299 (from book 3). Froissart's compositional process, from the rapidly recorded building block of the mémoire to the embellished or historiated chronicle, seems to foreshadow the division of labor described by fifteenth-century historical writers. In the prologue to his work, which is known as a chronicle, Jean Le Fèvre describes his office in the Burgundian chivalric order of the Golden Fleece as that of a recorder of written mémoires of events. Le Fèvre then sends these mémoires to the court orator, Georges Chastelain, who, "according to his pleasure and discretion, would employ them in the noble histories and chronicles he made" ( Chronique de Jean le Fèvre, ed. François Morand, 2 vols. [Paris, 1876], vol. 1, p. 1). Whereas Jean writes his "little book" (really a long chronicle) in his "gros" and "rude langaige" of Picard ''after the manner of a record or mémoire, " Chastelain's duty is to turn this "crude" historical matter into an elegantly laudatory Latin work.

14. Constans, ed., Roman de Troie, vol. 1, pp. 7-8, verses 113-33.

15. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols. (Paris, 1965-1970), vol. 2, p. 175, verses 5683-89.

16. John Fleming, Reason and the Lover (Princeton, 1984), p. 102.

17. See Glending Olson, "Making and Poetry in the Age of Chaucer," Comparative Literature 31 (1979): 272-90.

18. For more detailed discussion, see my book The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), especially the chapter "Jonglerie and the Missing Signs."

19. Alain de Lille, for instance, in his De Arte praedicatoria (J. P. Migne, continue

Patrologiae cursus completus. Series latina, 221 vols. [Paris, 1844-1864], vol. 210, col. 112), considered leonine (heavily or internally rhymed) verse theatrical, typical of actors and mimes, hence to be avoided in preaching; and in his early-thirteenth-century Ars versificatoria, Matthew of Vendôme reiterated that the empty formalism of leonine verse was the province of jongleurs and mimes (ed. Edmond Faral, Les Arts poétiques du XII ^e et du XIII ^e siècles [Paris, 1958], p. 166). Nicholas of Senlis in 1202 went so far as to pronounce that "No story set to rhyme is true," as Paul Zumthor reminds us in La Lettre et la voix (Paris, 1987), p. 203.

20. Charles H. Livingston, Le Jongleur Gautier Le Leu (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), "De Deus vilains," p. 206, verses 169-76. The name of the storyteller in this fabliau, Goulius (Glutton), is reminiscent of the Golias persona of much medieval Latin goliard play.

21. Constans, ed., Roman de Troie, vol. 1, p. 1, verses 1-39.

22. For Dares' brief and very rudimentary descriptions of physical features and temperaments, see Daretis Phrygii, De excidio Troiae Historia, ed. Ferdinand Meister (Leipzig, 1873), pp. 14-17. Benoît de Sainte-Maure emphasizes the reliability of Dares' eyewitness accounts. He tells us that the Trojan Dares, who was "marvellously" learned in all the seven arts and who realized the magnitude and import of the war, nightly wrote down the events of the preceding day (Constans, ed., Roman de Troie, vol. 1, pp. 6-7, verses 91-116). Benoît greatly amplifies the details of Dares' "objective" portraits of Greek and Trojan heros and heroines (ibid., pp. 263-92, verses 5073-562), as does Guido delle Colonne in his Latin prose version (Griffin, ed., Historia, pp. 83-87). Furthermore, Guido follows his portrait series with an elaborate spring topos opening (quoted in n. 8 above) not found in Dares, who merely lists the Greek leaders and ships that gathered to sail for Troy. For detailed comparisons of Benoît's with Chaucer's portraits, see R. M. Lumiansky, "Benoît's Portraits and Chaucer's General Prologue," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 55 (1956): 431-38.

23. Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou trésor, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1948), p. 204. The self-ridicule that distinguished the medieval jongleur remains a basic technique of modern stand-up comedians. By creating regressively infantile, foolish personae and thus deauthorizing or negating the seriousness of their words and gestures, modern comedians' self-mockery enables them to make extremely aggressive attacks on those in power. A master of such techniques was the French comedian Michel Coluche, the "buffoon of the French Republic," a comedian whose very name recollected the "coqueluche" (cock's comb) of the medieval fool's hood and whose persona was that of the plump enfant terrible from the suburbs (the margins), who continue

would be restricted by none of the rules of adult life, neither of polite behavior and manners nor of polite speech (his was filled with vulgar, slangy references to the body, sex, and excrement). Dressed in the bibbed overalls of a modern two-year-old or a manual laborer, he ran in the 1981 French presidential election in order, so he later said, to mock the grotesqueness of it, and his burlesque commentaries on political events and men in power were always cutting, truthful, and foolish. Because of Coluche's ability not only to express Everyman's hostility and frustration but to deny and control it through laughter, politicians may miss him most.

24. Howard, The Idea, p. 231.

25. On the ambiguity of this passage and of Chaucer's version of it, see P. B. Taylor, "Chaucer's 'Cosyn to the Dede,'" Speculum 57 (1982): especially p. 324: "Chaucer's epigram, as well as Jean de Meun's, plays on the word cousin . Besides 'blood-relative,' cousin denotes a 'dupe.' The word belies the thing it identifies or the idea it expresses. The pun dislodges Plato's point by affirming the ability of words to misconstrue the deeds they render while posing as the 'natural' expression of them."

26. Le Roman de la rose, ed. Lecoy, vol. 2, p. 211, verses 15, 161-62, for the maxim; Jean's equivocal discussion of the relationship between words and choses ("things") begins several lines earlier.

27. Howard, The Idea, p. 302.

28. W. Beare, The Roman Stage (London, 1950), p. 150.

29. Florence Ridley, The Prioress and the Critics (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), pp. 16-18.

30. Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, Eng., 1973); Terry Jones, Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London, 1980), p. 4.

31. John B. Friedman, "The Prioress's Beads 'of smal corel,'" Medium Aevum 39 (1970): 301-5. The Prioress's rosary beads "gauded al with grene" (A 150) may be loaded with more equivocal meanings than have already been discovered in the medieval symbolism and uses of coral and the "Amor vincit omnia" motto of the pendant brooch. In "Chaucer's Puns: A Supplementary List" ( PMLA 73 [1958]: 168), Paull Baum did not mention the possible pun on sexual desire in "grene'' nor the joyful connotations of the English word "gauded," which recollects the Latin gaudium and the French gauder, a verb of rejoicing that might be used in both sacred and secular contexts. From the same root, listed by Frédéric Godefroy in his Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française (10 vols. [Paris, 1880-1902]), vol. 4, pp. 244-45, are the Old French nouns gaudete and gaudine (a fun-loving woman or a pleasing woman) and gaudee (a "prayer said in haste and without paying attention" [perhaps because the thoughts continue

of the one who prays are distracted by worldly enjoyment]). Chaucer's phrase "gauded with grene" may describe not only the Prioress's beads themselves but also the spirit in which she tells, or plays with, them--with thoughts distracted by amorous pleasures. According to the Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath and S. Kuhn (Ann Arbor, 1952-), the noun grene * means sexual desire, as in the example given from Havelok (vol. G1, p. 336):

Of bodi was he mayden clene,
Neuere yete in game ne in grene
Wit hire ne wolde leyke ne lye,
No more than it were a strie.

For Chaucer, grene must have been a Northernism, a dialectal word. He may be playing the old goliardic and jongleuresque game of using a vulgar or dialectal pronunciation or meaning to subvert a more pious, proper one.

32. Pamphile et Galatée, ed. Joseph Morawski (Paris, 1917), p. 5, verse 48. For a complete list of appearances of the name Eglantine in Old French narrative sources, see Louis-Fernand Flutre, Table des noms propres avec toutes leurs variantes figurant dans les romans du moyen âge (Poitiers, 1962), p. 7.

33. To verify pastourelle conventions, one has but to leaf through a collection such as Karl Bartsch's Romances et pastourelles françaises des XII ^e et XIII ^e siècles (Leipzig, 1870). Curiously, the fruit of the eglantine, a sort of large rose hip, also appears in medieval verse. Peire Cardenal uses this fruit as a symbol for deception in two thirteenth-century Provençal lyrics. In "Un sirventes si en cor que comens," Peire compares a traitor to this fruit, "fleshy and round, full of evil humours" (no. 27, p. 156, verses 25-26), and in "Pos ma boca parla sens" (no. 64, p. 416, verses 37-45), he explicates the comparison ( Poésies complètes du troubadour Peire Cardenal, ed. René Lavaud [Toulouse, 1957]):

Semblans es als aguolens
Crois homps can gen si garnis
Que de foras resplendis
E dins val mais que ninens.
Ez es majers fenhemens
Que is us escaravais
Si fenhia papagais
Can si fenh que pros hom sia
Uns fals messongiers savais.

Similar to the eglantine's fruit / is the vulgar man when he dresses like a gentleman / so that he is splendid on the outside / and worth less than nothing on the inside. / And it is a greater deception / than if a dung beetle / pretended to be a parrot / when a false, low-down liar / pretends to be a worthy man. break

If the worthlessness of the handsome fruit of the eglantine was proverbial, or if it was part of any medical or natural lore that Chaucer may have known, I have found no evidence of this.

34. J. L. Lowes, "Simple and Coy: A Note on Fourteenth-Century Poetic Diction," Anglia 33 (1910): 446.

35. Gustave Servois, ed., Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole (Paris, 1893), pp. 68-69. Lines missing in the manuscript are denoted by centered ellipses in the following full citation and translation of "Bele Aiglentine": break

Bele Aiglentine, en roial chamberine,
Devant sa dame cousoit une chemise.

Ainc n'en sot mot quant bone amor l'atise.
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

Devant sa dame cousoit et si tailloit;
Mès ne coust mie si com coudre soloit:
El s'entroublie, si se point en son doit.
La soe mere mout tost s'en aperçoit.
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

"Bele Aiglentine, deffublez vo surcot,

"Je voil veoir desoz vostre gent cors.
--Non ferai, dame, la froidure est la morz."
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

"Bele Aiglentine, q'avez a empirier?
"Que si vos voi palir et engroissier."

     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

''Ma douce dame, ne le vos puis noier:
"Je ai amé .i. cortois soudoier,
"Le preu Henri, qui tant fet a proisier.
"S'onques m'amastes, aiez de moi pitié."
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

"Bele Aiglentine, vos prendra il Henris?
--Ne sai voir, dame, car onqes ne li quis.

     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

"Bele Aiglentine, or vos tornez de ci.
"Tot ce li dites que ge li mant Henri,
"S'il vos prendra ou vos lera ainsi.
--Volontiers, dame," la bele respondi.
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

Bele Aiglentine s'est tornee de ci,
Et est venue droit a l'ostel Henri.
Li quens Henri se gisoit en son lit.
Or orrez ja que la bele li dit.
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

"Sire Henri, velliez vos o dormez?
"Ja vos requiert Aiglentine au vis cler
"Se la prendrez a mouillier et a per?
--Oil," dit il, ''onc joie n'oi mes tel."
     Or orrez ja
Comment la bele Aiglentine esploita.

Oit le Henris, mout joianz en devint.
Il fet monter chevaliers trusqu'a .xx.,
Si enporta la bele en son païs
Et espousa, riche contesse en fist.
     Grant joie en a
Li quens Henris, quant bele Aiglentine a.

Beautiful Eglantine, in a royal chamber, / was sewing a shirt in front of her mother. / . . . / Not a word did she catch while love inflamed her. / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

Before her mother she stitched and clipped, / but she was not sewing at all as she ought to. / She was troubled, and so she pricked her finger. / Her mother noticed this right away. / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

"Beautiful Eglantine, take off your outer robe / . . . / I want to see your lovely body underneath." / "I will not, milady; the cold will kill me." / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

"Beautiful Eglantine, what is harming you / that I see you growing so pale and big?" / . . . / . . . / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

"My sweet lady, I cannot deny it. / I made love with a courtly soldier, / the worthy Henry, who won such praise. / If you ever loved me, have pity on me." / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

"Beautiful Eglantine, will Henry take you?" / "Truly, I don't know, milady, for I never asked him." / . . . / . . . / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

"Beautiful Eglantine, now depart from here. / Say to Henry everything I ask, / whether he will take you or leave you this way." / "Gladly, milady," the beauty replied. / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed. break

Beautiful Eglantine departed from there / and went straight to Henry's lodging. / Count Henry was lying in bed. / Now listen to what the beauty said to him. / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

"Sir Henry, are you awake or asleep? / Eglantine with the pretty face asks you now / if you will take her for wife and companion." / "Yes," he said, "I've never had such joy." / Now hear / how the beautiful Eglantine performed.

When Henry heard this, he became joyful. / He ordered twenty knights to mount / and carried the beauty off to his land / and married her, made her a rich countess. / Great joy has / Count Henry when he has beautiful Eglantine.

36. Georges Duby discusses the historical situation behind such literary fantasies in Le Chevalier, la femme, et le prêtre (Paris, 1981), p. 166, for example.

37. For the short version, "Bele Eglentine," see Gaston Raynaud, Recueil de motets français des XII ^e et XIII ^e siècles, 2 vols. (Paris, 1881), vol. 1, pp. 175-76. The context of this motet is the more common one of a manuscript collection of lyrics with no framing narrative. Paul Zumthor analyzes the "Bele Aiglentine" lyrics and uses them as an example of mouvance in "La Chanson de Bele Aiglentine," Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature 8 (1970): 325-37, and again in his Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris, 1972), pp. 290-98. Zumthor argues in ''La Chanson," pp. 328-30, against the modern editorial assumption that all of the stanzas of the Roman's version of "Bele Aiglentine" must originally have been of equal length, an assumption that leads to the conclusion that any irregularities and "missing lines" in the sole surviving manuscript version must be due to unintentional errors of transmission. Zumthor's argument for deliberate change is supported by my interpretation of the Aiglentine lyrics as deliberately debasing parodies of courtly love situations, deliberately errant transmissions of an authoritative courtly text.

38. Dictionary compilers have traditionally turned a censoring or blind eye to subversive puns, near-puns, innuendos, images. Even if they list erotic or scatological meanings, "serious" dictionaries do not list veiled puns or innuendos or metaphors that seem in any way conjectural. In short, we should not expect to be able to authorize and validate subversive goliardic or jongleuresque linguistic play by turning to the conventionally censorious authority of dictionaries.

39. For the "Miracle de l'abbeesse grosse," see Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, ed. Gaston Paris and Ulysse Robert, 8 vols. (Paris, 1876-1893), vol. 1, pp. 58-100. When it has no metrical purpose, the scribal doubling of vowels in some words, such as "abbeesse" here (or Chaucer's "solaas"), may sometimes signal wordplay by exaggerating and dwelling on the letter (rather than the spirit). This particular play, from a cycle of miracles of the Virgin written for performance before or by members of a continue

late-fourteenth-century northern French puy, is full of erotic innuendos. A precursor of Molière's femmes savantes, Sister Ysabel protests that the priest seems to be trying to incite the nuns with his vulgar sermonizing interlarded with "foolish" (or sinful) words (or syllables understood as words):

Il semblera ja qu'il nous tence,
Tant sermonnera lourdement:
Car de soz moz dit largement
  En son preschier.
(p. 60, verses 38-41)

Indeed it would seem that he is inciting us / by preaching so laboriously; / for he uses foolish words freely / in his preaching.

The abbess responds to this complaint with a reprimand: Sister Ysabel would evidently rather be dancing than listening to sermons and ought not to have her mind on such "solace." ("Dancing" could be a metaphor for love play or sexual intercourse, the "old dance"; and "solace'' could suggest the same, as well as wordplay, often involving vulgar innuendos.) Sister Ysabel's protest prepares us to perceive the erotic innuendos in the text of the priest's sermon, which is a biblical-sounding pastiche of Matthew 11:28 ("Come unto me all ye . . .") and of the language of the Pauline epistles. The priest's text is "Transite ad me, omnes qui concupiscitis me, / Et generacionibus meis implemini" (p. 61, verses 52-53). Instead of covering up, the priest's vernacular gloss tends to point possible erotic innuendos in the text:

. . . car je vous puis nuncier
Que ceulx qui ce desir entier
Ont en eulz par devocion,
Sanz vaine similacion,
La doulce vierge les appelle
Par une escripture moult belle,
Laquelle je vous proposay,
Quant je mon sermon conmençay,
Et dit: Venez a moy, venez,
Vous trestouz qui me desirez,
Et je vous vouldray acomplir
Touz voz desirs et raemplir
Vous de mes generacions.
(p. 62, verses 106-14)

. . . for I announce to you / that those who have this desire wholly / within themselves through devotion, / without vain pretense, / the sweet Virgin calls them / with a very beautiful passage of Scripture / that I proposed to you / when I began my sermon / by saying: Come to me, come, / all you who desire me / and I would like to fulfill / all your desires and fill / you with my generations. break

The priest presents the speaker of the text he repeats as the "sweet Virgin," perhaps punningly pronounced verge (slang for penis) or easily misunderstood as such. Such a pun completely subverts any spiritual understanding of the pastiched scriptural text: "I would like to fulfill / all your desires and fill / you with my generations."

How are we to take such wordplay? For one thing, it is temporary; few plays in the miracle cycle are on such potentially comic subjects as a pregnant prioress. Once we recognize the signs of a temporary ritual reversal, of game overturning earnest, we are supposed to participate actively in the subversion of authority. We are not supposed to think that the characters of this miracle play are real people who intend erotic puns in addressing one another; rather, these characters are masking personae that allow their author and audience to play with the deauthorized words voiced through them. We enjoy the erotic puns and innuendos because of their incongruity and subversive effect in the mouths of religious personae. The erotic subtext is also perfectly appropriate to the burlesque plot of this miracle play in which the abbess will seduce and become pregnant by her clerk and then be rescued from the investigation of the bishop by a miraculous "Virgin delivery."

1. Le Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire and Gaston Raynaud, eds., Oeuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps, 11 vols. (Paris, 1878-1903), vol. 11, p. 14.

2. Philippe de Navarre, Les Quatre Ages de l'homme, ed. Marcel de Fréville (Paris, 1888; rpt. 1968), pp. 52-53. For an analysis of Matthew Arnold's criticism that Chaucer "lacked high seriousness," see Richard Lanham, "Game, Play, and High Seriousness in Chaucer's Poetry," English Studies 48 (1967): 1-7.

3. Benson, Riverside Chaucer, p. 584.

4. This English translation of St. Bernard's letter is by E. G. Holt, Literary Sources of Art History (Princeton, 1947), p. 19.

5. For visual confirmation, see the collection of exhibitionistic images in Claude Gaignebet and J. Dominique Lajoux, L'Art profane et religion populaire au moyen âge (Paris, 1985), for example, the section entitled "The Siren" (pp. 142-43). See also the images collected by Karl Wentersdorf, "The Symbolic Significance of Figurae scatologicae in Gothic Manuscripts," in World, Picture, and Spectacle, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, 1984), pp. 1-19, figs. 1-27; and by H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape-Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London, 1952).

6. Gaignebet and Lajoux, L'Art profane, pp. 192-201. break

7. Ibid., pp. 210-15.

6. Gaignebet and Lajoux, L'Art profane, pp. 192-201. break

7. Ibid., pp. 210-15.

8. Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1957), p. 180.

9. This is the subject of Thomas Cooke's The Old French and Chaucerian Fabliaux: A Study of Their Comic Climax (Columbia, Mo., 1978).

10. R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabilaux (Chicago, 1986), p. 127.

11. On ritual communitas and its functions, see Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London, 1969).

1. There is a beautiful color reproduction of this frontispiece in the facsimile edition of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College ms. 61 of Troilus and Criseyde, with introductions by M. B. Parkes and Elizabeth Salter (Cambridge, Eng., 1978).

2. See Margaret Galway, "The 'Troilus' Frontispiece," Modern Language Review 44 (1949): 161-77; and George Williams, "The 'Troilus and Criseyde' Frontispiece Again," Modern Language Review 57 (1962): 173-78.

3. James H. McGregor, "The Iconography of Chaucer in Hoccleve's De Regimine Principum and in the Troilus Frontispiece," Chaucer Review 11 (1977): 346.

4. Derek Pearsall, "The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer's Audience," Yearbook of English Studies 7 (1977): 68-74, with three plates of pulpit preaching scenes; Elizabeth Salter, "The ' Troilus Frontispiece,'" in Parkes and Salter, eds., Troilus, pp. 15-23, with several reproductions of preaching scenes, especially from the Pèlerinage de vie humaine .

5. Salter, "' Troilus Frontispiece,'" p. 17.

6. Of these preaching scenes Salter writes (ibid., pp. 17-19), "in direct response to the wording of the opening lines of the poem in which Deguileville, a Cistercian monk of the Royal Abbey of Chaalis, near Senlis, addressed himself to 'riche, povre, sage et fol / soient roys, soient roynes / pelerins et pelerines . . ,' we can trace the development of a lively 'recital' scene, with poet-monk addressing an appropriately mixed audience from his pulpit."

7. Lydgate's Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, 2 vols. (London, 1906-1935), vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 169, verses 863-67. In this and subsequent citations from this edition, I have replaced the thorn symbol by th, the yogh by gh, and modernized the usage of u and v .

8. This definition is cited by Henri Rey-Flaud, Le Cercle magique: Essai sur le théâtre en rond à la fin du moyen âge (Paris, 1973), p. 33. In the early continue

printed edition of the Aequivoca I examined (Andreas Myllar Scotus, 1505), this explanation of a theater appeared at the beginning of quire c as part of the entry explaining the equivocal senses of Latin cena . It is interesting that cena and scena should be associated, not only by the sounds of the two words, but also in practice, banquets being the context for many plays. I do not want to get into the issue of whether or not there were permanent public theater buildings in the Middle Ages after the Roman ones had been put to other uses or fallen to ruin. See "Were There Theatres in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries?" by Roger S. Loomis, with commentary by Gustave Cohen, Speculum 20 (1945): 92-98; and Dino Bigongiari's essay by the same title, Romanic Review 37 (1946): 201-24. There is good sense in Bigongiari's suggestion, p. 222, that theatrum in writings of the eleventh through early thirteenth centuries may mean no more than "scaffolding" or "platform.''

9. See Mary H. Marshall, "Theater in the Middle Ages," Symposium 4 (1950): 22-23.

10. In a chapter on "Sermon and Drama" in Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2d rev. ed. (New York, 1961), pp. 471-547, G. R. Owst explored relationships between medieval sermons (some heavily dialogued and versified) and medieval religious drama.

11. The similar Terence illuminations of Paris, B.N. lat. 7907A, fol. 2v, and Paris, Arsenal lat. 664, fol. 1v, are reproduced in color by Millard Meiss in French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and Their Contemporaries (1400-1425), 2 vols. (New York, 1974), vol. 2, figs. 209, 210.

12. See Nicolai Treveti, Expositio Hercules Furentis, ed. V. Ussani, Jr. (Rome, 1959), p. 5; the passage is cited by Mary Marshall in "Theater in the Middle Ages," p. 27; and by Beryl Rowland in " Pronuntiatio and its Effect on Chaucer's Audience," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982): 33-51. In "Isidore and the Theater," Comparative Drama 16 (1982): 47n. 25, Joseph R. Jones cites a commentary by Raoul de Praelles from 1375 in which Raoul gives contemporary analogies for Isidore's definition of drama: "est une petite maison ou milieu du theatre en laquelle avoit ung letrin ou len lisoit les tragedies et comedies des poetes et y avoit gens desguisez qui faisoient les contenances de ceulx pour lesquelz len chantoit et faisoit ces jeux ainsi comme tu vois que len fait encores au jour duy les jeux de personnaiges et charivalis. Et y avoit joueurs de divers instrumens et autres qui se desguisoient et contrefaisoient les personnes de qui la tragedie ou comedie parloit" ("there is a little house in the middle of the theater in which there was a lectern where they read the tragedies and comedies of the poets, and there were disguised men who initated the facial expressions of those for whom they sang and held these games, just continue

as you see people doing still today in plays involving characters and in charivaris, and there were players of various instruments and others who disguised themselves and played the characters of whom the tragedy or comedy spoke").

13. See, for instance, Meiss's reproduction in French Painting, fig. 208, of an early-fifteenth-century illumination of a Roman theater production, with three sets of lovers embracing in the audience (Paris, Arsenal 5060, fol. 27).

14. On the London puy and its regulations in the reign of Edward I, see Henry Riley, ed., Liber Albus, Liber Custumarum et Liber Horn, in Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis . Vol. 2, Part 1: Liber Custumarum (London, 1860), pp. 216-28 (the quotations are taken from page 219); John H. Fisher, John Gower (New York, 1964), pp. 78-83; and Martin Stevens, "The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature," Publications of the Modern Language Association 94 (1979): 62-76.

15. On the puy 's sponsorship of plays, see the ordinances of the Puy Nostre-Dame of Amiens edited by Victor de Beauvillé in Recueil de documents inédits concernant la Picardie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1860, 1867), vol. 1, p. 141: "Lequel disner il fera apointier à gracieuse et courtoise despence sans excès, et durant iceluy disner fera le maistre jouer ung jeu de mistère, et donra à chascun des assistans ung chapel vert et ung mès dudit mistère, avec une couronne d'argent que gaignera celuy qui fera le meilleur chant royal selon le reffrain du tablel" ("He will organize this dinner according to gracious, courteous liberality, without excess; and during the dinner the master will see that a 'mystery' play is performed, and he will give to each of the seated banqueters a green cap and a course at dinner of [in some way representing] the said 'mystery,' along with a silver crown, which will be won by the man who makes the best chanson royale according to the refrain on the painted tableau"). The ordinance goes on to state that everyone from Amiens, even if he has composed a chanson royale, must pay his share of the dinner, at the discretion of the master; the only exceptions to this rule are invited foreign poets or religious mendicants. This wording suggests that the chansons royales made by local members were somehow integrated into the performance of the play (which was perhaps an enactment of the allegorical tableau); on the other hand, ''foreign" poets' lyrics (probably not composed upon that year's chosen refrain) "serve" or enhance the festivities and the reputation of the Puy of Amiens in a more general way.

The occasional nature of this verse, which "serves" the visual representation of the painted tableau or the festivities and reputation of the puy in general, may explain the name serventois frequently applied to lyrics praising the Virgin in French manuscripts pre-dating these Amiens ordi- soft

nances, which were drawn up in 1471, in "renewal of the ordinances introduced in the past for the maintenance of the feast of the Puy Nostre-Dame founded and established by the rhetoricians of the town of Amiens in the year of grace 1388" (Beauvillé, Recueil, pp. 139-40). For some speculations on the puy of Arras's dramatic productions, see Edmond Faral, Les Jongleurs en France au moyen-âge (Paris, 1910), pp. 141-42. The practical issue of who paid for the dinner seems to loom large in the rules of medieval literary societies (even fictive ones): the London puy encouraged poetic composition by accepting a chanson royale (set to music) as payment; Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims agreed that they would all chip in to pay for the dinner of the best storyteller; the Amiens puy excused only invited guests from paying for their dinners. It got progressively more difficult to win a free dinner by means of poetic prowess.

16. The rules of the London puy are the first to prescribe modesty in the decoration of the hall: no silken or golden draperies or curtains, but only an "honest" beautification of fresh leaves and a "cloth of gold" (such as we see in the Troilus frontispiece) upon the raised puy or podium, here termed a seat or "siege," from which the singers perform the lyrics: "Endroit de la sale ou la festu du Pui serra serve, est assentu qe desore ne soit drap de or ne de saye pendu, ne la sale cortinee; sauve qe ele soit honestement florie des foillez, enjunchee, apparile des banquers, ausi come il appent a tele feste roiale; sauve qe li siege ou li chantour chaunterount les chauncouns reals, soit covert de un drap de or" (Riley, Liber custumarum, p. 226). See also A.-G. Ballin, Notice historique sur l'Académie des Palinods (Rouen, 1834), p. 9, on the rules of 1486 for the tribune or podium that the Palinods called the "Puy de la Conception'' (for performing verses especially conceived to celebrate the Conception of the Virgin).

17. Peire d'Alvernha, Liriche, ed. Alberto Del Monte (Turin, 1955), no. 12, p. 127, verses 85-86.

18. Fisher also counters Riley's view that the London puy no longer existed in the fourteenth century ( John Gower, p. 80): "the Puy was a cultural organization and . . . the period of the Hundred Years' War marks the high point of French influence in England, on language, literature, dress, and manners. There is no reason to suppose that an organization so thoroughly naturalized that by 1299 it could be endowed with income from London real estate, and whose third Prince--indeed the only individual named in the regulations--was evidently an Englishman, Johan de Chesthounte (John Cheshunt), should not have survived into the middle of the century."

19. For an explication of this wordplay, see Auguste Breuil, La Confrérie de Notre-Dame du Puy d'Amiens (Amiens, 1854), pp. 56-59.

20. A beautiful facsimile edition of B.N. fr. 145 has been edited by continue

Georges Durand, Tableaux et chants royaux de la confrérie du Puy Notre-Dame d'Amiens (Paris, 1911).

21. Breuil, La Confrérie, p. 7: "The frequent translation of the word 'Puy' by 'well' in the documents concerning this society; the well accompanying the great silver image carried in processions; the wells embroidered on church ornaments--give us no difficulty. Picardy, as we know, was the acknowledged home of the rebus ."

22. See Salter, "' Troilus Frontispiece,'" p. 17 and fig. 1; and Meiss, French Painting, figs. 403-5. In the Limbourg illumination that is iconographically closest to the Troilus frontispiece, a courtly retinue is emerging from a castle doorway in the left foreground and heading on down the road. Although there is a conical mountain topped by a castle in the distant background, there is no sign that the group will change direction, turn left, and climb the mountain.

23. See, for example, the early-fifteenth-century Boucicaut Hours (Paris, Jacquemart André Museum ms. 2, 18v, 20v), where such coneshaped mountains rise behind the pilgrim St. James and the roasting of St. Lawrence; these, and a number of similar peaks in the exotic landscapes of medieval travel and pilgrimage narratives, are reproduced by Millard Meiss in French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Boucicaut Master (London, 1968), figs. 6, 8, 81, 86, 87.

24. Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman, 2 vols. (Greenwich, Conn., 1971), vol. 1, p. 65; cf. figures.

25. Two such fourteenth-century Nativity images of scalable Marymountains appear in American collections: one in the Gallery of the University of Miami at Coral Gables, the other in the Detroit Institute of Arts. For reproductions of these paintings, see Fern Shapley, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italy, XIII-XV (London, 1966), fig. 187; and Walter Heil, Catalogue of Paintings in the Permanent Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 2 vols. (Detroit, 1930), vol. 1, fig. 208. My references come from Princeton's Index of Early Christian Art.

26. The thirteenth-century regulations of the London puy completely shut out women's participation and justified this as a lesson that men could and should honor women "as much in their absence as in their presence": "nule dame ne autre femme ne doit estre a la graunt [siege] du Pui, par la resoun ke om doit de ceo ensaumple prendre, e droit aveyemeent, de honurer, cheir, et loer trestotes dames, totes houres en touz lieus, au taunt en lour absence come en lour presence" (Riley, Liber custumarum, p. 225). The Amiens puy 's fifteenth-century renewal of its regulations shows a certain softening of earlier policy. If wives of former members leave gifts to the puy in their wills, the wives are entitled to special funeral services with all the masters and their wives in obligatory atten- soft

dance. This additional item is dated 18 March 1493 (Beauvillé, Recueil, p. 145). Moreover, the great manuscript of paintings and poems, Paris, B.N. fr. 145, was executed by the members of the puy of Amiens for a curious female.

27. Francis Lee Utley, "Scene-Division in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde," in Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Albert C. Baugh, ed. MacEdward Leach (Philadelphia, 1961), pp. 109-138; Robert G. Benson, Medieval Body Language: A Study of the Use of Gesture in Chaucer's Poetry (Copenhagen, 1980), pp. 82-100; Barry Windeatt, "Gesture in Chaucer," Medievalia et Humanistica 9 (1979): 143-61.

28. Anthologized in Derek Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London, 1978), vol. 1, p. 326.

29. Ibid., p. 301.

28. Anthologized in Derek Brewer, Chaucer: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London, 1978), vol. 1, p. 326.

29. Ibid., p. 301.

30. Paul Zumthor, "The Text and the Voice," trans. Marilyn Engelhardt, New Literary History 16 (1984): 89.

31. See Walter J. Ong, "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," Publications of the Modern Language Association 90 (1975): 13-17, for an overview of authorial techniques of getting readers to assume roles, to fictionalize themselves. break