1. "Of custom, and not easily changing an accepted law," in The Complete Essays of Montaigne , trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 79, 83.

2. I have taken the last phrase from The Essays of Montaigne , trans. John Florio, 3 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 1:112. The French text is Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 115.

3. Plato, "Gorgias," trans. W. D. Woodhead, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato , ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 266-267.

4. See Jean Daniélou, Sacramentum Futuri: Études sur les origines de la typologie biblique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1950), 115.

5. Readers trained in Chartrian poetics—the Platonic notion that life is an intellectual pilgrimage of the soul—were accustomed to seek hidden truth. See Donald Kelly, The Art of Medieval French Romance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 63. A prominent example of moral bewilderment based on this notion occurs in the vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail when Gawain encounters the evil customs of the Castle of Maidens. Here the narrative resolution takes the form of an explanation by a hermit that the seven brothers who maintain the foul custom represent the seven deadly sins, the castle represents hell, and the maidens are to be understood as "the souls of the just that were undeservedly imprisoned there before the passion of Jesus Christ" ( Grail 79). The problem of knowing how to behave ill an earthly as opposed to a spiritual context, the great theme of the Grail story, emerges from the clash between Gawain's martial values, which lead him to defeat the seven knights, and the surprising explanation of the hermit, based on an opposing, spiritual set of values, that by killing the seven brothers Gawain prevented them from doing penance for their wicked custom.

6. The Beaurepaire episode begins at line 1699. The later prose Lancelot also makes marriage a means to real estate. In that story, the custom of the castle of Estroite Marche ("la droiture del chastel et encontre les coustumes," L 8:277) derives from the will of the local people, who have told their lord that he has waited too long to marry off his daughter. They decree that no knight may spend the night at the castle unless he jousts the next day and swears always to be the enemy of anyone who attacks Estroite Marche. Hector therefore must fight Marcanors, who works for the King of the Hundred Knights and every day arrives at the castle's bridge to joust. As a representative of King Arthur's royal power, which reaches into and stabilizes the countryside, Hector satisfied the "borgois de ceste vile" ( L 8:279) by defeating Marcanors and arranging a marriage for the lord's daughter. Compare the cyclic version in Lancelot ("Que jamais chevalier n'entrast en cest castel qu'il ne jeust une nuit en ma maison et demorast l'endemain jusc'a miedi en l'aide de la vile," L 8:280) to the noncyclic version in Lancelot do Lac ("Et il me distrent que ja mais chevaliers n'antrast an cest chastel qui ne geüst une nuit an [ma] maison[et] qui ne d[em]orast l'andemain anjusque au midi an l'aide de la vile. Et lo jor qu'il s'an devroit aler, ainz qu'il aüst les armes, li covanroit jurer sor sainz que a tozjorz seroit nuisanz et annemis a toz ces qui guerroieroient lo Chastel de l'Estroite Voie—issi a non li chastiaus,'' L2 447).

A similar situation occurs in Yvain , where a woman maintains the Custom of the Boiling Spring to select a husband and lord for her estate. Because Yvain has won her he must decline the hand of the lord's daughter at the Castle of Most Ill Adventure.

7. Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 115-116. Donald Maddox points out that Chrétien's "preoccupation" with customs "precedes and anticipates the development of customals" such as the Summa de legibus Normanniae (1235-38) or the Coutumes de Beauvaisis of 1283 ( The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 139 and 165). In his study of Chrétien's romances, Maddox treats many scenes and issues (contracts, community, methods of adjudication, rituals) that the present study can only suggest. He concludes that "the Arthurian romance unveils a world ill regulated by its customs, chronically prone to crisis, and repeatedly destabilized in the absence of effective upholders of its institutions" ( The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes , 119).

8. Roger Sherman Loomis traces the bastons cornus (horned staves) of the two champions to the Coutumier de Normandie (1194-1223), the Assises de Jérusalem , the Coutumier d'Amiens , and another thirteenth-century "Norman-French compilation which goes under the name of Britton," concluding that their equipment is based on "the judicial practices of Christendom from Acre to England" but that "it would have been contrary to custom for two champions to fight on one side." To this he adds, seriously, "nor would the intervention of the lion have been tolerated." See Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 323-325.

9. Arthur is torn between his need to uphold the Custom of the White Stag, which he inherited from his father, and his realization that dissension will rend his court if he must choose the most beautiful woman to kiss as the custom requires.

Arthur's custom exemplifies the first of three kinds of customs that Erich Köhler identifies in Chrétien's romances, since it is both the basis of his rule and a constraint on it. From a political and sociological point of view, Arthur provides an outlet for the idle and dangerous energies of his knights. As a figure of central authority, the king has as much obligation to provide adventures as he does to give gifts to maintain the social order. The second type of custom in Chrétien's romances occurs where someone has misappropriated a custom for strictly personal benefit, creating a dissonance between the interests of the indi-

vidual and those of the community as represented by an Arthurian knight. This type describes the "custom" of defending a fountain that begins Erec and Enide , where the device allows a widow with property to be integrated with the main social group. A third type of custom usually takes place at what Maddox calls a "remote locus," where a villain has arbitrarily instituted a foul custom which the hero undoes in some great terminal adventure, as in the "Joy of the Court," where Erec reestablishes order and harmony by excelling at battle and thereby earning the right to abolish a custom which no one could modify because it is based on the absolute imperative of the single combat. See Köhler, "Le rô1e de la 'coutume' dans les romans de Chrétiens de Troyes," Romania 81 (1960): 386-397, and Maddox, The Arthurian Romances , 35ff.

10. Maddox, The Arthurian Romances , 8.

11. Arthur Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), 229.

12. The award is regulated by the composition made between the prior "and the bailiffs and the commonality of the said city of old time" ( English Historical Documents: 1327-1485 , ed. A. R. Meyers [New York: Oxford University Press, 1969], 565).

13. According to Marc Bloch, customs could be a source both of continuity and of constraint because there could be bad customs : "In fact, the legal documents quite frequently use these words, but almost invariably they are applied to rules actually or supposedly of recent origin—'those detestable innovations,' 'those unheard-of exactions,' denounced by so many monastic texts. A custom, in other words, might seem especially to deserve condemnation when it was too new. Whether it was a question of Church reform or of a lawsuit between two neighbouring lords, the prestige of the past could scarcely be contested save by setting against it a past more venerable still" ( Feudal Society [1940; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961], 88).

14. "Sanz faille cele costume que li jaianz i establi i fu puis trop longuement tenue" ( T 456.30).

15. "A savez vos por quoi je ai ensi establie ceste costume? Por ce que je veil que vox avez des ores mesa seignor le meillor chevalier que aventure aportera ceste part, et que vos aiez a dame la plus bele que aventure vox i envoiera" ( T 456.51).

16. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 113.

17. J. G. A. Pocock makes this point in The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 159.

18. The English translation is that found in Sir Thomas More, Utopia , trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1975), 10. For the Latin text, see The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), IV: 58-59 ("haec nostris, inquiunt, placuere maioribus, quorum prudentiam utinam nos aequaremus").

19. Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason Conteinying the atone of Logique , ed. Richard Sprague (Northridge, Calif.: San Fernando Valley State College, 1972), 199.

20. "Hoc veritatis fundamentum, non consuetudinis abusum sequor" (Peter Ramus, Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian [1549], trans. Carole Newlands [DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986], 99 and 179, including the Latin text).

21. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 237.

22. See The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) and the note on custom in Merritt Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey, 1957), 696-697.

23. Thomas Wilson reproaches Catholicism for promoting worship "not in spirite, but in Copes, in Candlesticks, in Belles, in Tapers, and in Censers, in Crosses, and many good morowes else," in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), fol. 19, or the edition of G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), 33. Russell H. Wagner rules that because Wilson did not revise his text, citations should be to the 1553 edition, not to the 1560 reprint by Mair ("The Text and Editions of Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique," MLN 44 [1929]: 421 - 428). The difference is slight.

24. Cicero remarks, "Consuetudine autem ius esse putatur id quod voluntate omnium sine lege vetustas comprobarit" ("Custom law is thought to be that which lapse of time has approved by the common consent of all without the sanction of statute," De Inventione , The Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960], 2.22.67).

25. Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique , fol. 19; Mair's edition, 33. I have slightly modernized the spelling.

26. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law , 36, presumably citing Sir Edward Coke.

27. Alan Harding, A Social History of English Law (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973), 217.

28. See William C. Dowling, Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to "The Political Unconscious " (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 129. I am greatedly indebted to Bill Dowling, in person and in prose, for helping me shape this introduction.

29. Bacon defines the idols in Novum Organum , the second book of his Great Instauration . See The Works of Francis Bacon , 3 vols. (Philadelphia: M. Murphy, 1876), 1:45-47 (essay) and 3:347-353 (idol of the theater).

30. Pascal, Pensées , 274.

31. For Samuel Daniel's Defense of Rime (1603), see Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker, The Renaissance in England (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1954), 657. Daniel published his Defense to promote the Gothic "neochivalric mode that had dominated Elizabethan court pageantry from the late 1570s on" as the proper "custom" of England to contrast the imperial "Roman manner" of the new monarch, King James, whom he regarded as a royal intruder from Scotland. See Richard Helgerson, "Barbarous Tongues: The Ideology of Poetic Form in Renaissance England," in The Historical Renaissance , ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

32. Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 343 n.

33. Aristotle, Poetics , trans. Gerald E Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 48 (1455 ^b 1-15).

34. Trimpi, Muses , 308.

35. Ibid., 343.

36. I have not been concerned in this study with the castle of knowledge or perseverance or the castle as an image of the soul or the besieged female body—each a well-known topic of Renaissance scholarship. I have sought, instead, a process of social adjustment that is often disconcerting, imprecise, and uncertain. The practical and social nature of the custom of the castle distinguishes it from (although it has its roots in) the theme of private hospitality and that court hospitality that surrounds a festival, studied by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner in Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century French Romance: The Convention of Hospitality (1160-1200) (Lexington: French Forum, 1980). For a different but related analysis, see Roberta Douglas Cornelius, The Figurative Castle: A Study in the Medieval Allegory, of the Edifice with Especial Reference to Religious Writings (Bryn Mawr, Penn.: n.p., 1930); G. R. Kernodle, From Art to Theater (Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1944); Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); and Thomas M. Greene, Besieging the Castle of Ladies , Occasional Papers, no. 4 (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995). Prof. Greene's seminar on Ritual and Ceremony, held at the Newberry Library in 1988, encouraged me to pursue the topic of this book.