ABSTRACT 
  
Title of disertation:  THE WHEEL OF LANGUAGE: REPRESENTING  
    SPECH IN MIDDLE ENGLISH NARRATIVE, 1377- 
    1422 
 
    David Kennedy Coley, Doctor of Philosophy, 2008 
 
Disertation directed by: Profesor Theresa Coleti 
    Department of English 
 
  
This disertation examines representations of speech in narative poetry in English 
between 1377 and 1422, a four-and-a-half decade span marked by almost constant 
political, religious, social and economic upheaval. By analyzing the work that late 
medieval writers imagined the spoken word to perform ? or, alternately, by examining 
how speech acts functioned performatively in medieval literary discourse ? the author 
demonstrates how the spoken word functioned as a defining link between the Middle 
English text and the cultural tumult of the late medieval period. More important, by 
focusing on speech as a distinct category within linguistic discourse, the study alows for 
a reappraisal of the complicated relationships betwen text and cultural environment that 
have been iluminated by scholarship on the politics of vernacularity and the development 
of the English language. 
 Chapter one uses The Manciple?s Tale to probe Chaucer?s engagement with the 
nominalist philosophy of Wiliam of Ockham, a philosophy which opposed the via 
antiqua and threatened to overturn the linguistic, epistemological, and ontological 
hierarchies that had been prevailed in various forms since the writings of Augustine of 
Hippo. Chapter two analyzes representations of sacramental and priestly speech in the 
anonymous Saint Erkenwald. By doing so, it redirects the critical conversation about the 
poem away from the role of baptism in redeeming the righteous heathen and toward the 
eucharistic theology that undergirds it, a critical that shift extends our understanding of 
the poem?s engagement with the emerging Wyclifite heresy and with typological notions 
of medieval Christian identity. Chapter thre focuses on the works of Thomas Hoccleve, 
fiftenth-century Privy Seal clerk and would-be court poet. By examining the overtly 
performative speech acts in Hoccleve?s Marian lyrics, particularly ?The Story of The 
Monk Who Clad the Virgin,? it establishes the existence of an idiosyncratic economy of 
speech within the poet?s canon, an economy that becomes paradigmatic for the mingled 
systems of monetary and interpersonal exchange that prevailed in the Lancastrian 
dynasty?s early decades. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE WHEL OF LANGUAGE: 
REPRESENTING SPECH IN MIDDLE NGLISH NARRATIVE, 1377-1422 
 
 
 
by 
 
 
David Kennedy Coley 
 
 
 
 
Disertation submited to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the 
University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfilment 
of the requirements for the degre of 
Doctor of Philosophy 
2008 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Advisory Commite: 
 
Profesor Theresa Coleti, Chair 
Profesor Verlyn Flieger 
Profesor Robert Gaines 
Profesor Marshal Grossman 
Profesor Thomas Moser 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
?Copyright by 
 
David Kennedy Coley 
 
2008 
 
ii 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
 One of the pleasures of finishing this disertation is having the formal opportunity 
to thank those who have supported me along the way. I owe an unpayable debt to my 
advisor, Theresa Coleti, and it is to her that I give my first and loudest thanks. Since I 
arived at the University of Maryland, Theresa has encouraged me intelectualy and 
profesionaly; I owe what I am, as an academic and a scholar, to her. I am also deeply 
grateful to Thomas Moser, whose advice, insight, and careful engagement with my work 
has been imensely valuable. Finaly, thanks to Verlyn Flieger, Marshal Grossman, and 
Robert Gaines for reading and responding so thoughtfully to this disertation, and to 
Michael Israel for his help at an early stage of the proces. 
 Outside the University of Maryland I have also received a great deal of 
encouragement. I offer my gratitude to David Walace, Jennifer Summit, and Frank 
Grady, each of whom has helped shape my work in important ways. To Kenneth Bleth, 
who first introduced me to medieval literature and whose friendship I value to this day, I 
give my deepest thanks. 
 I am fortunate to have a family that has been unfailingly supportive of my 
decision to pursue graduate study. My parents and my step-parents have provided much-
needed emotional and material support, and their collective belief in the intrinsic value of 
education has been a shaping influence on my life. To my wife Kim, whose love and 
patience I have too often returned by glowering at the computer scren, I can only offer 
my unending love and gratitude. 
 I give this disertation to the two people from whom it has taken the most, my 
daughters Johanna and Alison. Finaly, it is done. Now we can go outside and play. 
iii 
 
 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS          i 
 
 
INTRODUCTION            1 
 ?That whel wol cause another whel? 
 
 
1. ?A wiked tonge is worse than a fend?:        37 
 Nominalism, Speech, and Power in The Manciple?s Tale 
 
 
2. ?And chaungit cheuely hor nomes?:         94 
 Eucharist, Baptism, and Sacramental Utterance in Saint Erkenwald 
 
 
3. ?Seye it ek with good deuocioun?:         157 
 Economies of Speech and Redemption in the Works of Thomas Hoccleve 
 
 
EPILOGUE             213 
 ?With hym ther was a Plowman, was his brother?: The Two Plowmen and 
 the Power of Speech 
 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY            218
1 
INTRODUCTION 
 
?That whel wol cause another whel? 
 
 Just before it crashes to a premature and inconclusive end, the aliterative Wars of 
Alexander relates how its eponymous hero, having presed his army wel past the 
boundaries of the known world, reaches the shore of a vast ocean. There, at the ragged 
edge of the earth itself, the fated conqueror hears the sound of his own language lapped 
back at him by cold, monster-infested waves: 
[Alexander] .. cairis on forthire 
To !e Occyan at !e erthes ende, & !are in an ile he heres 
A grete glauir & a glam of Grekin tongis. 
"an bad he kni!tis !aim vnclethe & to !at kithe swym, 
Bot al at come into !at cole, crabbis has !aim drenchid. 
   "an sewis furth !at souerayn, ay by !a salt strandis 
Toward !e setynge of !e son in seson of wintir.
1
 
The potent blend of alterity and familiarity in this pasage ? the terible crabs that drown 
Alexander?s men and the acustomed speech of ?Grekin tongis? ? is enigmatic; the whole 
scene evokes nothing so much as the siren songs beckoning Ulysses on his journey home 
from Troy. But Alexander?s odyssey is of a diferent sort than Ulysses?s, and the voices 
                                                
1
 [Alexander caries on farther to the ocean at the Earth?s end, and there, on an island, he hears a great 
chater and a din of Grek tongues. Then he bade his knights to unclothe themselves and to swim to that 
place, but crabs drowned al that went into the cold water. Then the sovereign proceds forth, always by 
the salt strand, toward the seting of the sun in the season of winter.] The Wars of Alexander, ed. Hoyt 
Dugan and Thorlac Turvile-Petre, EETS s.s. 10 (Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 1989), 174 (l. 5628-
5634), translation mine. 
2 
that cal to the Macedonian warior king from the island at the end of the world sem to 
mock rather than entice, to confront Alexander with the futility of escape from his 
ignoble bloodline, the inevitability of his death, the senselesnes his often violent 
conquests, and the utter impossibility of his martial aspirations.
2
 Does Alexander send 
his men into the ocean to investigate the familiar speech from across the waves; or does 
he send them out, as he has done so many times before, to conquer what confronts him 
and subdue the words that echo from the edge of the earth? Whatever the reason, the 
atempt is ultimately futile. As his men drown horribly, Alexander can only turn the 
remains of his army toward the failing sun and toward a Macedonia he knows he wil not 
live to se. 
 Alexander was not the only doomed king preoccupied with spoken language. On 
another island near the edge of the known world, Richard I struggled to maintain control 
of the English crown in the face of an increasingly aggresive cabal of appelants.
3
 In the 
summer of 1397, he atempted to squelch those appelants once and for al by making 
them answer for the Merciles Parliament of 1388, a proceding in which the appelants 
severely (if temporarily) circumscribed Richard?s royal authority. Chief among those 
appelants was Richard?s uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, the duke of Gloucester. Seized 
by Richard?s forces and held captive in the English teritory of Calais, Gloucester was 
eventualy coerced into admiting wrongdoing; just before his death he isued a full 
                                                
2
 Christine Chism observes that ?in teasing at the barier betwen self, other, and monster, [these lines] 
sugest the monstrousnes of Alexander?s whole endeavor, the extremity of the desires that drive him.?  
Se Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Pres, 202), 149. 
3
 While it is imposible to asert with certainty the composition date for Wars of Alexander, most critics 
have located it betwen the years 1361 and 1450, thus making it posible that the literary strugles of 
Alexander coincided with the dynastic strugles of Richard I. For a brief, cogent analysis of the poem?s 
authorship and date, se Dugan and Turvile-Petre?s introduction to Wars of Alexander, p. xli-xlii. 
3 
spoken confesion, which was recorded and then read aloud to Parliament.
4
 Among the 
most serious articles in the confesion was Gloucester?s admision that he engaged in 
treasonous speech: 
Also, in that I sclaundred my Loord, I knowleche that I dede evyll and 
wykkedly, in that I spake it unto hym in sclaunderouse wyse in audience 
of other folk .. Also, in that I was in place ther it was communed and 
spoken in manere of deposal of my liege Loord, trewly I knowlech wele, 
that we were asented therto for two dayes of thre, And then we for to 
have done our homage and our oothes, and putt hym as heyly in his estate 
as ever he was. But forsothe ther I knowlech, that I dede untrewly and 
unknyndely as to hym that is my lyege Loord, and hath bene so gode and 
kynde Loord to me. Wherefor I beseche to hym naghtwythstondyng myn 
unkyndenese, I beseche hym evermore of his mercy and of his grace, as 
lowly as any creature may beseche it unto his lyege Loord.
 5
 
Gloucester?s groveling was for naught; the duke died, apparently of natural causes, 
shortly after isuing his confesion. The admision that he ?spake sclaunderouse wyse? 
and ?in manere of deposal of [his] liege Loord,? however, proved damning even after his 
death ? Gloucester was posthumously convicted and condemned by the crown. Two 
other appelants met similar fates: the earl of Arundel was beheaded for treason; the earl 
of Warwick, also deemed guilty of treason, was exiled and stripped of his lands and title. 
                                                
4
 For a thorough acount of Richard?s actions against the ?Merciles Parliament? apelants, se Mathew 
Giancarlo, ?Murder, Lies, and Storyteling: The Manipulation of Justice(s) in the Parliaments of 1397 and 
139,? Speculum 7 (202): 76-112. 
5
 From the Rotuli Parliamentorum, quoted and translated in Giancarlo, ?Murder, Lies, and Storyteling,? 
81. 
4 
Like Alexander at the far end of the world, King Richard had reached the zenith of his 
power. All that remained was for him to return. 
 Richard had waited nine years to exact retribution for the Merciles Parliament. 
By contrast, the remaining appelants? retribution for Richard?s Revenge Parliament was 
stunningly swift. In July of 1399, Henry Bolingbroke landed in Yorkshire from his exile 
in France, and by September he had succeded in exacting from Richard a spoken 
?confesion? of his own. The King declared his ?inability and insufficiency? to rule, and 
although he retained the ?marks set upon his soul by sacred unction,? he gave his asent 
for Bolingbroke (now Duke of Lancaster) to succed him on the throne. Like 
Gloucester?s confesion of 1397, Richard?s statement was read aloud to Parliament: 
acording to the Parliamentary Rolls, ??the king himself wilingly, as it appeared, and 
with a happy face? .. took the document and read it out loud himself ?distinctly? .. and in 
its entirety.?
 6
 And so Henry, duke of Lancaster, with Richard?s (coerced) spoken asent, 
became Henry IV. And so Richard I ? whose aspirations to semi-divine status had once 
led him to demand extravagant forms of addres from his subjects and even to boast that 
the laws of the realm existed ?in his own mouth? ? was brought low as a prisoner in 
Pontefract Castle. In a mater of months he would die there.
7
 
 I bring together these two examples ? one historical and one literary ? not 
necesarily to draw point for point comparisons among the Wars of Alexander, the 
deposition of Richard I, and the ascendancy of the Lancastrian dynasty. Rather, I want 
                                                
6
 Giancarlo, ?Murder, Lies, and Storyteling,? 93-94, 10. 
7
 David Walace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolute Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy 
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Pres, 197), 297. For an analysis of the extravagant adreses upon 
which Richard insisted, se Nigel Saul, ?Richard I and the Vocabulary of Kingship,? English Historical 
Review 10 (195): 854-77. 
5 
to suggest the importance of the spoken word in both literature and the historical record, 
and to posit the spoken word as a point of intersection between the two. With these 
examples, I also want to preview the general contours of this disertation, a study that 
shows how representations of direct speech in late medieval narative respond to and 
comment upon the political, religious, and economic upheavals that wracked England 
between the reigns of Richard I and Henry V. More specificaly, I explore how the 
speech acts described in literary texts, such as the unspecified Grek voices that cal to 
Alexander, both comment on and are contingent upon important cultural and political 
events in the fourtenth and fiftenth centuries, events that include the deposition of 
Richard I, the rise of the Lolard heresy, and the political machinations of the early 
Lancastrian dynasty.
8
 
 In order to do this, I apply the insights and vocabulary of modern speech-act 
theory ? particularly the observations of J. L. Austin and John Searle ? to the exigencies 
of the premodern text. By focusing on speech as a distinct category within linguistic 
discourse, I demonstrate that the eficacy and function of speech stood at the center of 
rifts within the Ricardian and Lancastrian periods, that the spoken word itself existed as a 
deeply contested cultural and sociopolitical site in the fourtenth and fiftenth centuries. 
Questions of what speech could do and who was authorized to deploy it were closely 
linked to contemporary crises of sacramentalism, ontology, and dynastic authority. By 
analyzing the work that late medieval writers imagined the spoken word to perform ? or, 
alternately, by examining how speech acts functioned performatively in medieval literary 
                                                
8
 I wil use the phrase ?early Lancastrian? throughout this disertation as shorthand for the reigns of Henry 
IV (r. 139-1413) and Henry V (r. 1413-2), the first two Lancastrian kings. 
6 
discourse ? I show the spoken word to be a defining critical link between the Middle 
English text and the tumult of the fourtenth- and fiftenth-century English nation. 
 
Throughout this disertation, I wil argue that speech was central to the social and cultural 
environment of the Ricardian and early Lancastrian periods; here I want to elucidate the 
specific contexts upon which I wil focus and to explain why I bring them together. The 
first of these contexts is the linguistic and epistemological intervention of the fourtenth-
century Oxford philosopher Wiliam of Ockham. Perhaps best known for his so-caled 
?razor,? Ockham?s chief contribution to the philosophical milieu of his own time was his 
argument against the existence of universals, transcendent constructs that realist 
scholastic philosophy held were the ?principal, stable and imutable forms or reasons? 
upon which al individual forms were predicated.
9
 Ockham posited that universals were 
not transcendent, divinely-ordained constructs but existed only as ?thought-object[s] in 
the mind,? gleaned through observation and knowledge of individual forms.
 10
 This 
ontological shift ? a de facto reversal of centuries of scholastic theory ? had an enormous 
impact on late medieval understandings of speech and the functions that speech could 
perform. In traditional scholastic thought the spoken word was inert and representational, 
wholly subordinated to the universal through a stable and specific hierarchy. By 
obviating the universal, however, Ockham destabilized that hierarchy and opened the 
possibility for speech to function not only representationaly but creatively. To put it 
crudely, under Ockham?s nominalist philosophy, speech became imensely powerful, 
                                                
9
 Augustine, On Eighty-Thre Diferent Questions in Paul Vincent Spade, A Survey of Medieval 
Philosophy, Version 2.0 (1985), 383, <htp:/ww.pvspade.com/Logic/docs/Survey%202%20Interim.pdf>. 
10
 From Ockham?s Ordinatio, in Wiliam of Ockham, Ockham: Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. 
Philotheus Boehner (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1957), 41. 
7 
capable not only of communicating our understandings of reality but also of altering our 
perceptions of reality itself, even of creating individual realities by interfering with the 
?thought-objects? upon which knowledge of reality is predicated. For Ockham and his 
followers, the world was contingent upon speech rather than speech being contingent 
upon the world. 
 Ockham?s nominalist philosophy afected fourtenth- and fiftenth-century 
understandings of the position of al speech within an overarching ontological system; in 
contrast, the fourtenth-century theologian John Wyclif was particularly interested in a 
specific kind of speech, that asociated with the sacraments. The disident theologian?s 
arguments against sacramental speech roughly delineate the second cultural context with 
which this disertation wil engage. Taking aim ost vehemently at the sacrament of the 
Eucharist, Wyclif, who was as much a realist as Ockham was a nominalist, argued that 
the orthodox explanation of transubstantiation was a logical impossibility. Even after the 
sacramental words of consecration were uttered, he aserted, the body of Christ could not 
entirely replace the substance of bread and stil leave behind bread?s sensual trappings, or 
acidents. The acidents of bread, in other words, could not stand alone without their 
substance; as Wyclif writes, the ?power !at prestis han stande! not in transsubstansinge 
of !e oste, ne in makyng of acidentis for to stonde bi hemsilf.?
11
 Wyclif proposed 
instead that priests could, by uttering the appropriate sacramental words, add Christ?s 
esence to the substance of bread, but under no circumstances did he alow for the 
wholesale substitution of former for the later. Thus, at the very heart of Wyclif?s atack 
on the Eucharist, we find a question about the eficacy of speech: can a priest?s spoken 
                                                
11
 Wyclif, ?Of Confesion,? in Wyclif, The English Works of John Wyclif, 345. 
8 
utterance make the acidents of bread stand miraculously alone without their substance 
(the orthodox position) or can that utterance merely add the esence of Christ to the 
substance of bread (the position held by Wyclif)? 
Wyclif?s theological break from the orthodox medieval Church and the anti-
clerical stance that the disident theologian often asumed helped to engender England?s 
first native heretical group, the Lollards. Emerging in the mid 1370s and 80s and 
declining precipitously after the Oldcastle rebelion of 1414, Lollardy (or Wyclifism) 
was perceived as a very real threat to the social fabric of England in the Ricardian and 
Lancastrian periods. In 1395 that threat prompted Roger Dymmok to present Richard I 
with an anti-Lollard book reiterating the full and exclusive presence of Christ in the 
consecrated host. Dymmok also warned that failure to afirm ?the sacramental sign of 
bread and wine currently maintained by the Church [would] destroy civil society? and 
lead to an anarchic ?destruction of the community, whether this [community] is a city or 
a kingdom.?
12
 By the early 1400s, the usurping Lancastrian kings seized upon such anti-
Lollard sentiment. The sacrament of the Eucharist itself ? and particularly the belief that 
spoken priestly consecration enacted an orthodox transubstantiation ? was held to be a 
?litmus test of orthodoxy?; denial of transubstantiation and of the priest?s eficacious 
speech was the very root and definition of heresy.
13
 In this political and religious 
climate, the fundamental question of what the spoken word could and could not do 
became the central isue of the central rite of the central organizing body in medieval 
England. 
                                                
12
 David Aers, Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: 
University of Notre Dame Pres, 204), 9 
13
 Paul Strohm, England?s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 139-1422 (New 
Haven, CT: Yale University Pres, 198), 47. 
9 
In the early years of Lancastrian kingship, the threat posed by Wyclifism collided 
with the exigencies of Wiliam of Ockham?s nominalism. In his struggle to legitimize the 
uneasy crown he usurped from Richard I, Henry IV positioned himself as a champion of 
orthodoxy and scourge of the Lollards, efecting the 1401 pasage of the statute known as 
De Haeretico Comburendo (which advocated the punishment of heretics by burning) and 
queling heterodox writing with Archbishop Arundel?s Constitutions of 1407-09. Paul 
Strohm documents that such resistance to Lollardy was important to the upstart 
Lancastrian dynasty for several reasons: by fashioning themselves upholders of the 
orthodox Church, Henry IV and his supporters hoped to gain broad public support for 
Henry?s claim to the Crown. But Lancastrian resistance to Lollardy also had an 
important intrinsic rationale. The very transformation of the host that Lollards denied 
also served as the theological and metaphorical underpinning for the project of 
Lancastrian kingship: just as the sacramental words of the Eucharist transformed bread 
into body, so too did the sacral coronation oath transform Henry, Duke of Lancaster into 
Henry IV, King of England. Strohm writes: 
The Lancastrian commitment to ideas of transformation, so intense that it 
may be considered obsesional, is justified and defended by a strategy of 
doubling or division. Good transformation ? that is sacral transformation, 
elevation of inward properties without outward or apparent change ? is 
reserved to the king .. The Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs 
and more signs: more eficacious, more numerous, more motile and 
transferable. Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spiritual 
10 
encourages respect for mater?s stubborn resistance) .. pose a .. threat to 
the Lancastrian symbolic.
14
 
In this respect, the eficacy of the speech act that turns bread into body is of critical 
importance to the Lancastrian dynasty; the invisible but substantive change that 
sacramental speech efects is in crucial ways analogous to the coronation oath taken by 
Henry in 1399, an oath that had the power to ?transform a claimant into a king? despite 
the absence of visible, physical change.
15
 
Anathema to Wyclif and the Lollards, the transformative potential of sacramental 
language was necesary to Henry IV and Henry V in the wake of Richard I?s deposition. 
So too, it sems, were the les miraculous transformations that Ockham?s nominalism 
suggested could be enacted by speech ? the manipulation of those mental ?thought-
objects? upon which human knowledge of reality is predicated. The first two Lancastrian 
kings embarked on a project of what we would now cal propaganda (or what George 
Orwel might cal ?newspeak?): they manipulated writen chronicles and prophesy, legal 
writings, and even gossip in order to bolster their claim to the throne. The Lancastrian 
atempt to secure power by controling language ? and particularly by controlling the 
explicitly spoken language of gossip ? resonates strongly with the precepts of nominalist 
thought. Indeed, by controlling the speech that helped create public understanding of the 
political realities of Lancastrian usurpation, the new dynasty clearly atempted to control 
the contours of reality itself, restructuring it in their own favor.
16
 This political 
                                                
14
 Strohm, England?s Empty Throne, 141. 
15
 Strohm, England?s Empty Throne, 139. 
16
 Se Strohm, England?s Empty Throne, 2-3. 
11 
manipulation of language constitutes the third overarching social context with which this 
disertation engages. 
Bringing together these cultural and political contexts, this disertation 
demonstrates that questions about the eficacy of the spoken word were central to the 
Ricardian and early Lancastrian periods. More important, however, it investigates how 
such semingly disparate isues as Ockham?s theories on the signifying and creative 
functions of speech; Wyclif?s denial that priestly, sacramental speech could efect the 
miracle of transubstantiation; and Lancastrian manipulation of rumor, gossip, and other 
forms of linguistic expresion are in fact related by a shared understanding that the 
spoken word can perform work, that speech contains the potential to afect directly, even 
to efect, its specific cultural environment. Although such a notion is not wholly unique 
to the period I cover in this disertation, the 45 years spanning the reigns of Richard I, 
Henry IV, and Henry V stand at a confluence of events that heighten the importance 
acorded to the spoken word. These events include the increasing centrality of Corpus 
Christi to the medieval Church, the social displacements and hierarchical shifts (partly 
precipitated by the Black Death) that occurred in the mid- to late-fourtenth century, and 
the new social and political relevance acorded to the vernacular (an isue I wil discuss 
in more detail below).
17
 Finaly, the years covered by this disertation are, as Anne 
Middleton has shown, years in which ?poetry was to be a ?common voice? to serve the 
                                                
17
 For the growing prominence of Corpus Christi in the medieval Church, se Sarah Beckwith, Christ?s 
Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 193); Miri Rubin, 
Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pres, 191). The 
shifting hierarchies of the later fourtenth century are sucinctly detailed by Paul Strohm in Social 
Chaucer, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pres, 1989), especialy chapter one, ?Chaucer and the 
Structure of Social Relations,? 1-23. 
12 
?common good.??
18
 Poetry itself, then, in its ?public? capacity as social mediator, was 
necesarily understood not to be inert and reflective but functional, active, and alive. In 
this respect, it is teling that Middleton?s discussion of public poetry frequently 
emphasizes the metaphorical poetic ?voice? over writen words: ?public poetry 
generaly,? Middleton argues, ?speaks ?as if? to the entire community ? as a whole.?
19
 
Individualy, the chapters of this disertation generaly correspond to the thre 
cultural contexts cited above. Chapter one, ??A wikked tonge is worse than a fend?: 
Nominalism, Speech, and Power in the Manciple?s Tale,? probes Chaucer?s engagement 
with the nominalist philosophy of Wiliam of Ockham. I demonstrate that Chaucer?s 
preoccupation with Ockham?s nominalist ideas reaches its apogee in The Manciple?s 
Tale, a work that shows the poet considering both the epistemological ramifications of 
nominalism as wel as the unsetling possibilities raised by the potential for language to 
alter reality or, in its most extreme form, to create it anew. In chapter two, ??And 
chaungit cheuely hor nomes?: Eucharist, Baptism, and Sacramental Utterance in Saint 
Erkenwald,? I analyze representations of sacramental and priestly speech in the 
anonymous Saint Erkenwald, a fourtenth-century aliterative poem that dramatizes the 
posthumous salvation of a righteous heathen by the poem?s titular saint. This analysis 
redirects the critical conversation about the poem away from the role of baptism in 
redeeming the heathen and toward the eucharistic theology that undergirds it, a critical 
shift that extends our understanding of the poem?s engagement with Wyclifite heresy 
and brings the poem into conversation with isues of eucharistic theology and medieval 
Christian identity. Chapter thre, ??Seye it ek with good deuocioun?: Economies of 
                                                
18
 Ane Midleton, ?The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard I,? Speculum 53 (1978): 95. 
19
 Midleton, ?Idea of Public Poetry,? 98. 
13 
Speech and Redemption in the Works of Thomas Hoccleve,? builds on recent studies that 
consider Hoccleve?s often conflicting roles as Privy Seal bureaucrat and would-be court 
poet.
20
 By examining the speech acts in the criticaly overlooked Marian lyric, ?The 
Story of The Monk Who Clad the Virgin by Singing Ave Maria,? I establish the existence 
of a specific economy of speech throughout Hoccleve?s Marian works, one in which 
supplicant and Virgin are locked in a system of mutual dependence predicated on the 
causative potential of the spoken word. Furthermore, I show how this economy of speech 
becomes paradigmatic for the systems of economic and interpersonal exchange that 
Hoccleve develops in his beter known works, including La Male Regle and the five-
poem cycle known as The Series. By bringing together Hoccleve?s Marian lyrics and 
autobiographical works in this way, I iluminate the collision between traditional 
devotional culture and emergent fiftenth-century bureaucratic systems, a collision that 
fundamentaly informed the poetic production we asociate with the Lancastrian dynasty. 
 
When we consider the importance of speech to the philosophical, theological, and 
sociopolitical contexts that prevailed between Richard I?s ascension in 1377 and Henry 
V?s untimely death in 1422, we se an England deeply and actively invested in the 
potential of the spoken word to efect change. But the specific linguistic isues identified 
above must themselves be put into the context of the increasing prominence of the 
English vernacular in the later Middle Ages. Although England was (at least) a trilingual 
nation in the medieval period, ?between 1300 and 1420,? as Nicholas Watson notes, ?the 
position of English writing within this trilingual literary culture became much more 
                                                
20
 Ethan Knap, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hocleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England 
(University Park: Pensylvania State University Pres, 201); Nicholas Perkins, Hocleve?s Regiment of 
Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 201). 
14 
important.? English texts appeared ?in far greater quantities than previously, gathering to 
themselves a new sense of their importance and undergoing a degre of standardization, 
as writers tried both to articulate their growing consciousnes of the distinctivenes and 
coherence of English language and culture and to give the language a closer status to that 
of French or Latin.?
21
 This heightened consciousnes ? and increased production ? of 
writing in English is a signal development in the literature of the fourtenth century, one 
rife with implications for England?s burgeoning ?national [and] cultural identity,? as wel 
as for ?the spread of literacy and learning both down the social scale and across the 
gender divide.?
22
 
 The development of the English vernacular in the fourtenth century is closely 
linked to medieval practices of translation; indeed, the vast majority of Middle English 
texts ? as wel as the majority of texts that this disertation engages ? have their germ in 
Latin originals or texts writen in other European vernaculars such as French or Italian. 
Chaucer provides examples of both: his Manciple?s Tale is a close redaction of the story 
of Phoebus and the crow from Ovid?s Latin Metamorphoses; his Knight?s Tale is based 
upon Boccacio?s Italian Tesida; and his early dream visions have their root in French 
models such as The Romance of the Rose.
23
 Recent studies have shown translation into 
                                                
21
 Nicholas Watson, ?The Politics of Midle English Writing,? in The Idea of the Vernacular: An 
Anthology of Midle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Brown, et. al. (University 
Park: Pensylvania State University Pres, 199), 33. 
22
 Watson, ?The Politics of Midle English Writing,? 31. Se also The Cambridge History of Medieval 
English Literature, ed. David Walace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 199), 485-487; also, The 
Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson 
(University Park: Pensylvania State University Pres, 203), especialy the preface (ix-xii) and Watson?s 
introduction (1-13); David Aers and Lyn Staley, Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics and Gender in 
Late Medieval English Culture, University Park, Pensylvania State University Pres, 196). 
23
 In adition, the House of Fame draws heavily from Dante?s Comedia and includes pasages translated 
from Boethius?s De Institutione Musica; Saint Erkenwald is a lose translation of the Latin Trajan legend, 
found in such sources as Jacobus de Voraigne?s Aurea Legenda; and large portions of Hocleve?s Series 
are drawn from the Gesta Romanorum. Se Piero Boitani, ?What Dante Meant to Chaucer,? in Chaucer 
15 
the vernacular to be more than simply an efort to maintain consistent meaning between 
the ?original? and the vernacular translation. Rather, translation has been more 
acurately understood as an act of interpretation and criticism, ?a site where cultural 
relations of dominance and subservience might be played out.?
24
 Rita Copeland in 
particular has demonstrated that vernacular translation serves to transfer not only specific 
texts into the mother tongue but also the cultural and social cachet those texts caried 
with them. ?Translation,? Copeland posits, ?was also a primary vehicle for vernacular 
participation in, and ultimately appropriation of, the cultural privilege of Latin academic 
discourse.?
25
 Thus, texts like Chaucer?s Manciple?s Tale or the translations of the Gesta 
Romanorum in Hoccleve?s Series were not simply engaged in bringing Latin texts into 
the vernacular. Rather, they were engaged in a wider efort to translate the prestige of 
Latin and Latinity into the English tongue. Understood in these terms, translation 
becomes a deeply political project, and writen translations themselves highly charged 
political texts. 
 The political dimensions of translation were nowhere more strongly felt than in 
the Englishing of that most central of writen texts, the Bible. Indeed, if we understand 
the project of translation as ?the means by which cultural value and authority was [sic] 
transmited from one period to another,? the translation of the single most important book 
in medieval Europe not only promised to acord an incommensurate prestige on the 
                                                                                                                                            
and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1983), 15-139; 
Gordon Whatley, ?Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in its Legendary Context,? Speculum 61 (1986): 
330-32; Roger Ellis?s introduction to Thomas Hocleve, ?My Compleinte? and Other Poems, ed. Roger 
Ellis (Exeter: University of Exeter Pres, 201), 8. 
24
 Ruth Evans, Andrew Taylor, Nicholas Watson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Brown, ?The Notion of Vernacular 
Theory,? in The Idea of the Vernacular, 317. Se also Alistair Minis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: 
Scholastic Literary Atitudes in the Later Midle Ages, 2
nd
 ed. (Aldershot, UK: Wildwod House, 198). 
25
 Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Midle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Pres, 191), 3. 
16 
vernacular itself, it also posed a genuine threat to the medieval Church, whose claim to 
authority rested largely on its exclusive aces to and interpretation of the Latin 
scriptures.
26
 In the period that this disertation covers, the isue of biblical translation is 
centered around the Wyclifite Bible, which appeared in at least two versions in the last 
decade of the fourtenth century.
27
 
The two-part response that these biblical translations engendered ? the Oxford 
Translation Debates of 1401-07 and the promulgation of Archbishop Arundel?s 
Constitutions in 1409 ? underscores the threat that they posed to the eclesiastical 
establishment. Of the barbed atacks on biblical translation that the Oxford debates 
generated, one particularly dramatic forecast of the consequences arising from an English 
Bible is worth repeating here at length: 
Translation into the mother tongue .. wil bring about a world in which the 
laity prefers to teach than to learn, in which women (mulierculae) talk 
philosophy and dare to instruct men ? in which a country bumpkin 
(rusticus) wil presume to teach. Translation wil also deprive good priests 
of their prestige. If everything is translated, learning, the liturgy, and al 
the sacraments wil be abhorred; clerics and theology itself wil be sen as 
useles by the laity; the clergy wil wither; and an infinity of heresies wil 
erupt. Even the laity wil not benefit, since their devotion is actualy 
                                                
26
 Evans, et al., ?The Notion of Vernacular Theory,? 317. 
27
 David Lawton, ?Englishing the Bible, 106-1549,? in The Cambridge History of Medieval English 
Literature, 454. Also, se Ane Hudson, The Premature Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Pres, 198), 
especialy chapter 5, ?Lolard Biblical Scholarship,? 27-27. For c. 1390 as the date of one version of the 
Wyclifite Bible se the apendix of Nicholas Watson?s ?Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-
Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel?s Constitutions of 
1409,? Speculum 70 (195): 862. 
17 
improved by their lack of understanding of the psalms and prayers they 
say.
28
 
The fears expresed in this admitedly alarmist response to Wyclifite biblical translation 
are, to a certain degre, fears over the corrupting influence of the vernacular itself, a 
?barbarous tongue .. gramaticaly and rhetoricaly inadequate as a vehicle for truth.?
29
  
But on balance, the concerns that Watson outlines are not so much about scriptural purity 
or dilution of theological truth as they are about upending the established eclesiastical 
hierarchies ? the relative positions of teacher and student asumed by the clergy and the 
laity, the ?prestige? enjoyed by ?good priests? over women and ?country bumpkins,? the 
?usefulnes? of clerics to lay people. As David Lawton rightly observes, the contests 
over English biblical translation were les contests over theological isues than contests 
over ?authority and who [had] aces to it.?
30
 
 These recent studies on the vernacular have highlighted the tremendous cultural 
and political work performed by language in the later Middle Ages, particularly in the 
politicaly dynamic reigns of Richard I, Henry IV, and Henry V. Although that 
scholarship has recognized that the vernacular ?bore a close resemblance to the spoken 
word,? it has not engaged with the paralel work performed by speech in the later Middle 
Ages, prefering instead to focus on text and writing.
31
 On one hand, such a focus is 
logical: we do not have direct aces to the medieval spoken word as we do to the writen 
text; medieval vernacular speech acts (like al speech acts) disappeared as soon as they 
                                                
28
 The acount is by Richard Ulerston, an orthodox cleric at Quens Colege, Oxford. Quoted in Watson, 
?Censorship and Cultural Change,? 843. 
29
 Watson, ?Censorship and Cultural Change,? 842-43. 
30
 Lawton, ?Englishing the Bible,? 457. 
31
 Introduction to The Idea of the Vernacular, xv. 
18 
were uttered. On the other hand, the literature of the later Middle Ages presents us with 
texts that are explicitly and centraly focused on the spoken word ? texts like Chaucer?s 
Canterbury Tales, which chronicles a fictional storyteling contest performed by a group 
of pilgrims, and the aliterative Saint Erkenwald, which details a confesional dialogue 
between a reanimated pre-Christian corpse and a seventh-century London bishop. 
Moreover, we know that many of these texts were writen for oral presentation. Joyce 
Coleman shows that Chaucer and his near contemporaries produced carefully nuanced, 
writen verse for an audience that would often hear rather than se their words: ?Aurality 
? i.e. the reading aloud of writen literature to one or a group of listeners ? was in fact the 
modality of choice for highly literate and sophisticated audiences .. among the nobility of 
England, Scotland, France, and Burgundy from (at least) the fourtenth through the late 
fiftenth century.?
32
 This ?aurality? is evidenced in the text I used to open this 
introduction; The Wars of Alexander begins, ?When folk ere festid & fed, fayn wald !ai 
here / Sum farand !inge eftir food to fayne !are hertis.?
33
 So while we may not be able to 
recapture medieval speech acts themselves, the texts that we cal literature (from the 
Latin litera, meaning leter) may themselves be sen as records of speech, and the 
speech acts represented therein may be understood as verbal utterances in their own right. 
Though I wil be focusing specificaly upon the representations of speech within these 
literary texts, it is useful to recognize that those representations were articulated speech 
acts in their own right. 
                                                
32
 Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 196), 1-2. 
33
 [When folk are feasted and fed, they enjoy hearing some foreign thing after fod to make glad their 
hearts] Wars of Alexander, 1 (l. 1-2), translation mine. 
19 
 Many of the works I examine in this disertation have been previously analyzed in 
terms of their engagement with language and with writing. The Manciple?s Tale, for 
example, has been approached ?as an exploration of the nature of court poetry,? and the 
Manciple?s ventriloquizing crow has been described as a figure of the court poet 
himself.
34
 As a hagiography, Saint Erkenwald has frequently been understood as a 
translation of the Latin Trajan legend or, similarly, in the textual context of poems like 
the Anonymous Trental of Gregory, Lydgate?s Augustine at Compton, and the Vita Sancti 
Erkenwaldi.
35
 Even Hoccleve?s Marian Lyrics, when they have been analyzed at al, 
have most frequently been understood in the terms of their relationship to other writen 
Marian poetry and, more recently, to the writen petitions that dominated Hoccleve?s 
service as Clerk of the Privy Seal.
36
 This focus on writing is surely justified. When we 
consider the ?bryht golde letres? that encrust the heathen?s sarcophagus in Saint 
Erkenwald, the relationship between the Monk?s prayer regimen and Hoccleve?s 
Formulary in ?The Story of the Monk who Clad the Virgin,? or the Manciple?s repeated 
exhortations to ?red Salomon, .. red David, .. red Senekke,? we se details that 
underscore a self-conscious engagement with emerging paradigms of writing, translation 
and textuality.
37
   
                                                
34
 Louise (Aranye) Fradenburg, ?The Manciple?s Servant?s Tongue,? English Literary History 52 (1985): 
86. 
35
 Whatley, ?Heathens and Saints,? 30. 
36
 Se Beverly Boyd, ?Hocleve?s Miracle of the Virgin,? The University of Texas Studies in English 35 
(1956): 16-12 and The Midle English Miracles of the Virgin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pres, 
1964); Ethan Knap, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hocleve and the Literature of Late Medieval 
England (University Park: Pensylvania State University Pres, 201), 129-157. 
37
 Saint Erkenwald, ed. Cliford Peterson (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Pres, 197), l. 51. The 
Formulary is a masive compendium of the many leters and petitions required by the Privy Seal clerks on a 
day to day basis. Se Elna-Jean Young Bentley, ?The Formulary of Thomas Hocleve,? PhD disertation, 
Emory University, 1965. For an analysis of the relationship betwen the Formulary and Hocleve?s poetic 
output se Ethan Knap, ?Bureaucratic Identity and The Construction of the Self in Hocleve?s Formulary 
20 
But analyzing these works only in terms of those textual and writen paradigms 
provides an incomplete picture. Along with the bright gold leters that we se in St. 
Erkenwald, we hear the baptismal words that Erkenwald speaks over the corpse. 
Hoccleve?s Monk is asked by the Virgin Mary to speak a series of prayers aloud ?after hir 
doctryne and enformynge.?
38
 Chaucer?s Manciple reminds his felow pilgrims ad 
nausiam that ?God of his endeles goodnese / Waled a tonge with teth and lippes eke, / 
For man sholde hym avyse what he speeke? (IX 322-24). These details demonstrate that 
while Chaucer, the Erkenwald poet, Hoccleve and others wrote with an eye fixed on an 
emerging writen, literary, vernacular tradition, they also wrote with an ear atuned to the 
resonances of the spoken word. They were acutely aware of the centrality of speech to 
the political, social, and religious conflicts of their day. This study recognizes the 
?spoken-nes? of literature in the Ricardian and early Lancastrian periods, and in that 
recognition it presents a revised picture of the political and cultural work that poetry was 
able to perform. By revealing the centrality of the spoken word for these medieval 
writers, this disertation suggests new critical avenues for investigating the often public 
functions of poetry in the later Middle Ages. 
 
Performativity, Modern and Medieval 
 One theoretical construct important to my examination of speech in Middle 
English narative is the ?performative utterance.? As proposed by Oxford philosopher J. 
                                                                                                                                            
and La Male Regle,? Speculum 74 (199): 357-376. Al quotations from Chaucer?s works are from The 
Riverside Chaucer, 3
rd
 ed., gen. ed. Lary D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1987). Hereafter, they 
wil be cited in the text by line number and, if necesary, abreviated title. The lines cited above are from 
IX 34-45. 
38
 Thomas Hocleve, ?My Compleinte? and Other Poems, ed. Roger Ellis (Exeter: University of Exeter 
Pres, 201), 90, l. 8. 
21 
L. Austin in his series of lectures How to Do Things with Words, performative utterances 
are speech acts that ?[a] do not ?describe? or ?report? or constate anything at al, [b] are 
not ?true? or false?..? and in which ?[c] the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the 
doing of an action.? By this definition, statements such as ?I name this ship the Queen 
Elizabeth?
 
or ?I bet you sixpence it wil rain tomorow? are performative utterances.
39
  
Austin distinguishes performatives from constatives, utterances that describe or report 
something and can idealy be declared true or false: ?That ship is caled the Queen 
Elizabeth? or ?there are sixpence in my pocket? are constative utterances. As Austin 
continues his lectures, he blurs the distinctions between performatives and constatives, 
eventualy developing a general theory of speech acts organized around the locutionary, 
ilocutionary, and perlocutionary aspects of al utterances, constative and performative 
alike. The locutionary aspect refers to the ?utterance of certain words in a certain 
construction, and the utterance of them with a certain ?meaning?? ? the vocal speech act 
itself.
40
 The ilocutionary force roughly corresponds to the way in which a speaker 
?means? his utterance to be understood, while the perlocutionary force is the actual efect 
that an utterance has, one not necesarily connected to the utterance?s ilocutionary intent. 
Thus, one locutionary act ? let?s say a dirty joke ? can have multiple perlocutionary 
aspects: it can make me laugh; it can make me angry; it can offend me; it can put me at 
ease.
41
 In the more precise vocabulary of Austin?s general theory of speech acts then, a 
                                                
39
 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 2
nd
 ed., eds. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbis? (Cambridge, 
MA: Harvard University Pres, 1975), 5. 
40
 Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 94. 
41
 Austin lays out his tripartite distinction betwen the thre aspects of spech acts in Lecture VII (p. 94-
107) and therein provides the folowing synopsis of his rubric: ?We can .. distinguish the locutionary act 
?he said that..? from the ilocutionary act ?he argued that..? and the perlocutionary act; he convinced me 
that..? Se Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 10. 
22 
succesful performative is one in which the perlocutionary force of an utterance is its 
ilocutionary force, in which the efect generated by speech act is identical to its intent. 
 Austin?s work on performatives has been extended by John Searle, who focuses 
specificaly on the philosopher?s notion that spoken words have the potential to do work. 
Searle distinguishes performatives from constatives by what he cals ?the direction of fit? 
between the word and the world.
42
 In a constative or descriptive statement, the words 
uttered by the speaker fit the world; that is to say that the speaker?s words reflect his 
perception of the world around him. Thus, if I se a couple that I know to be maried, 
and I say, ?You are maried,? I have uttered a constative statement. A performative 
utterance, on the other hand, is one in which the world fits the words uttered by a 
particular speaker, an utterance that does not simply describe the world but that actualy 
alters it. When, under the proper circumstances, a justice of the peace says to my fianc? 
and me, ?You are maried,? he changes the world to fit his words.
43
 This definition of 
performativity even extends to the supernatural: Searle specificaly proposes that ?when 
God says, ?Let there be light!?? [He] makes the case by fiat that light exists,? thus 
uttering the very model of a performative utterance.
44
 As Saint Augustine of Hippo writes 
                                                
42
 Searle first discuses the fit betwen words and world in chapter 1 of Expresion and Meaning: Studies in 
the Theory of Spech Acts (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Pres, 1979). He crystalizes and refines 
his position in ?How Performatives Work,? Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (1989): 535-558. 
43
 The uterance ?you are maried? is among the clasic examples of the relative functions of constative and 
performative spech acts. Searle discused it in, among other places, ?How Performatives Work,? 547; 
Austin frequently discuses words related to mariage in How To Do Things with Words (se, for example, 
p. 5, 10, 16-17, and so forth). 
44
 Searle, ?How Performatives Work,? 549. The statement, ?Let there be light? changes what Searle 
describes as a brute fact. Searle explores the distinction betwen brute facts and institutional facts in 
Spech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1969). In 
his estimation, brute facts are facts whose existence derives primarily from the natural sciences and 
empirical observation: ?The paradigms vary enormously ? they range from ?This stone is next to that stone? 
to ?Bodies atract with a force inversely proportional to the square distance betwen them and directly 
proportional to the product of their mas? to ?I have a pain?, but they share certain comon features? (50). 
Institutional facts, on the other hand, ?are inded facts; but their existence, unlike the existence of brute 
23 
in the City of God, ?Dei quippe sublimior ante suum factum locutio ipsius sui facti est 
inmutabilis ratio? [For in fact the sublime speech of God in advance of his action is the 
imutable reason of the action itself].
45
  The Word of God does not merely describe; it 
creates. 
 There have been a number of productive disagrements with the theories 
propounded by Austin and Searle, none more influential than Derida?s atack on the 
logical foundations of Austin?s performative category itself. Specificaly, Derida takes 
isue with Austin?s exemption of literary and artistic speech ? the words ?said by an actor 
on the stage, or .. introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy? ? from his theory of 
performativity. Austin determines that artistic speech is ?in a peculiar way hollow or 
void?; it can not be performative because it is ?not used seriously, but in ways parasitic 
upon its normal use ? ways which fal under the doctrine of the etiolations of language.?
46
  
In other words, Austin reasons that because it is predicated secondarily upon ?normal? 
speech, the force of such derivative or ?citational? speech is radicaly atenuated and 
cannot be performative. Derida, however, reasons that by excluding literary language as 
?anomaly, exception, non-serious, citation,? Austin efectively excludes the very thing 
that makes al utterances possible in the first place, the ?general citationality ? or rather 
general iterability ? without which there would not even be a ?succesful? 
                                                                                                                                            
facts, presuposes the existence of certain human institutions. It is only given the institution of mariage 
that certain forms of behaviors constitute Mr. Smith?s marying Mis Jones? (51). 
45
 Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. T. E. Page, et al. and trans. Eva Mathews Sanford 
and Wiliam McAlen Gren (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pres, 1965), 5:36-37.  Augustine?s 
words resonate strongly with the definition of performativity proposed by Eve Swetser: performative 
spech is spech in which ?the words bring about the described world state, and are thus ontologicaly and 
causaly prior to it.? Se ?Blended Spaces and Performativity,? Cognitive Linguistics 1 (200): 310. 
46
 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2. 
24 
performative.?
47
 In other words, because al speech acts function precisely by virtue of 
their adherence or deviation from conventional constructs ? because speech acts are 
necesarily ?repetitions of an established procedure or formula? ? it is logicaly 
inconsistent for Austin to cordon of literary or dramatic speech acts from ?serious? 
ones.
48
 Thus, Derida determines that there is no diference between the ?normal? 
performative and the ?parasitic? performative: al performatives are similarly parasitic, 
al substantial speech acts are similarly hollow. 
 Unlike Derida, who dismantles the fundamental logic of Austin?s theory, Piere 
Bourdieu atacks the idea of performative speech in relatively straightforward terms, 
arguing that Austin and Searle simply misidentify the thing that makes speech 
eficacious. According to Bourdieu, it is not the spech but the speaker that makes an 
utterance performative: 
By trying to understand the power of linguistic manifestations 
linguisticaly, by looking in language for the principle underlying the logic 
and efectivenes of language as an institution, one forgets that authority 
comes to language from outside.. In fact, the use of language, the 
manner as much as the substance of the discourse, depends on the social 
position of the speaker, which governs the aces he can have to the 
institution, that is, to the oficial, orthodox, and legitimate speech.
49
 
                                                
47
 Jacques Derida, ?Signature Event Context,? in Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northweatern University 
Pres, 198), 17. A thorough but stil concise overview of Derida?s objections to Austin are in James 
Loxley, Performativity (London: Routledge, 207), especialy p. 72-87. 
48
 Loxley, Performativity, 74. 
49
 Piere Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and 
Mathew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pres, 191), 109. 
25 
Thus, rather than existing within the speech act itself, the power that speech sems to 
contain ? its ability to do work ? should more acurately be understood as a reflection of 
the social status of the speaker. Bourdieu insists that social circumstances are always 
inseparable from the efective deployment of performative speech. The degre to which 
the speaker has aces to the necesary social channels of authority determines the 
potential for that speaker to manifest the ilocutionary ? and perlocutionary ? force of his 
speech. 
 The critical conversation surrounding performativity has been productive for 
some recent analyses of Middle English literature. Bourdieu?s revision of Austin and 
Searle is particularly iluminating when we consider the fourtenth- and fiftenth-century 
English court itself, a locus in which courtiers employed various kinds of spoken 
discourse in an ongoing struggle for authority, patronage, and royal favor. Lynn Staley 
has recently explored this isue, arguing that in the literary and documentary texts of the 
late fourtenth century we can se ?an actual search for a language of power during the 
reign of Richard I.?
50
 Staley articulates a series of rhetorical strategies by which 
individuals within and around the royal court atempted to maintain (or enhance) their 
own positions of power: courtiers used a hierarchicaly coded ?language of love? to 
describe not only romantic but also political relationships; rivals to Richard?s power, 
often from the House of Lancaster, struggled to find a language that would circumscribe 
the king?s royal prerogative while enhancing their own; Richard himself deployed a 
continentaly inflected language of sacral kingship in order ?to produce a royal image as 
magicaly endowed as that of the French kings,? and he sought an appropriate and 
                                                
50
 Lyn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard I (University Park: Pensylvania State 
University Pres, 205), ix. 
26 
?meaningful .. language of princely addres? to secure his monarchal authority.
51
 Paul 
Strohm embarks upon a similar project in his examination of the fiftenth-century 
Lancastrian Kings. Like Staley, Strohm shows that the manipulation of language and the 
manipulation of power were, in the Lancastrian court, coterminous acts.
52
 The work of 
both Staley and Strohm, which clearly demonstrates the relationship between the creation 
of courtly power and the deployment of succesful strategies of discourse in late 
medieval England, acords with Bourdieu?s response to Austin by showing the intimate 
link between the eficacious utterance and the powerful speaker. 
 Derida?s discussion of iterability, as wel as Austin?s exclusion of ?citational? 
speech from ?normal? speech, have also proven instructive for recent work on the Middle 
Ages. In her examination of eclesiastical regulation of medieval preaching practices, 
Claire Waters determines that the logical inconsistencies concerning artistic and citational 
speech that Derida seized upon in Austin?s theories of performativity are analogous to 
Church concerns over the role of unlicensed preaching in the Middle Ages. Waters 
reasons that authorized, licensed preaching in medieval England was itself based on 
citation, specificaly on a ?lineage of .. priests and preachers whose words derived from 
the words of Christ, who were supposed to folow and imitate him, and who were 
authorized both by that point of origin and by the ongoing tradition of priestly office in 
which they stood.?
53
 In other words, the power of the licensed preacher derived directly 
from the citational relationship of his words to the words of Christ (an inversion of 
Austin?s sense that the power of citational speech is etiolated by virtue of its ?parasitic? 
                                                
51
 Staley, Languages of Power, 57, 147, 165. 
52
 Se Strohm, England?s Empty Throne, especialy p. 128-52. 
53
 Claire M. Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later 
Midle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Pres, 204), 18. 
27 
relationship to ?normal? speech). The presence of unlicensed lay preachers and self-
proclaimed prophets, however, threatened these official ?chains of citation? precisely 
because such figures worked outside of the church hierarchy and ?[claimed] a 
charismatic, personal authority .. that [was] much more dificult to regulate.? Absent the 
citational authority claimed by licensed preachers, the preponderance of unregulated, lay 
preaching in the later Middle Ages threatened to create eclesiastical contexts ?without 
any center or absolute anchoring (ancrage).?? This Derida-esque decentering of priestly 
authority was ?anathema to medieval preaching theorists,? and its specter drove 
eclesiastical eforts to regulate preaching.
54
 
 A Deridian insistence on iterability is also implicit in Susan Philips?s 
Transforming Talk, particularly in the argument that medieval gossip was predicated not 
upon principles of ?transgresion? but upon ?transformation.? Philips argues that far 
from being the exclusive (and exclusively transgresive) discursive domain of women in 
the Middle Ages, gossip in medieval England should be sen as a kind of speech that 
?influences and structures orthodox and literary practices,? speech that ?is both the 
obstacle and the tool of priests and pastoral writers [and] .. a device that enables 
vernacular poets to reinterpret Latin textual culture.?
55
 
 My own analysis of the speech acts represented in Middle English narative draws 
les from Derida and Bourdieu than do the readings I discuss above. Where I invoke 
modern speech act theory in this disertation, I more frequently use the interpretive 
vocabulary of Searle and Austin than the interventions of their post-structuralist critics. 
                                                
54
 Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures, 18-19. 
55
 Susan E. Philips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gosip in Late Medieval England (University 
Park: Pensylvania State University Pres, 207), 6-7. 
28 
Despite the thorough dislocation of Austin?s theory that Derida performs, the distinction 
that Austin and Searle draw between speech acts that shape their world and speech acts 
that reflect their world?s shape provides a useful interpretive framework for engaging 
with the literature of the Ricardian and early Lancastrian periods. Moreover, if that 
framework can also support the questions about power and authority that Bourdieu finds 
implicit in the spoken word ? and I propose that it can ? so much the beter. Where I do 
find Derida?s intervention extremely useful, however, is in justifying the heuristic link I 
draw between literary representations of speech and historical speech acts themselves. 
The objection might be raised that we do not ? nor can ever ? have aces to medieval 
speech; thus, the speech we se represented on the page (and the work that authors 
imagined it to do) are somehow inauthentic. In that argument, literary representations of 
speech are necesarily pale imitations of actual speech; they can not atest to the ?real? 
functions that speech was understood to have in the Middle Ages since they are not the 
?real? spoken words of the Middle Ages. Such an argument is, of course, a variation of 
Austin?s exclusion of the parasitic, citational and etiolated language of artistic expresion 
from his theory of performativity. What Derida shows is that such citational speech is 
no more etiolated than any other speech. It is structuraly and functionaly identical to the 
speech we hear spoken, to the speech that Chaucer would have heard spoken, to the 
speech that Hoccleve ventriloquizes in his Series, or even to the baptismal utterance that 
the Erkenwald poet writes into his poem. Understanding speech in this capacity alows 
us to engage with textual representations of speech on the same level that we might 
engage with vocalized speech, even the vocalized speech recorded in the Rolls of 
Parliament over 600 years ago. Thus, our engagement with literary representations of 
29 
Middle English speech can itself be sen as engagement with historical Middle English 
speech; the potential of one is the same as the potential of the other. 
 
The Whel of Language: Representations of Spech in the House of Fame 
The ?grete glauir & [the] glam of Grekin tongis? that grets Alexander at the 
end of the world is reminiscent of another incomplete Middle English poem, a comic 
rather than an epic quest that likens the indistinct rumble of ?speche and chidynges? (HF 
1028) to the ?betynge of the se.. ayen the roched holowe? (HF 1034-5). Chaucer?s 
House of Fame is an unapologeticaly perplexing work, a dream vision that takes its 
reader (and its dreamer narator, Gefrey) on a tour through glas temples and enormous 
wicker labyrinths comparable to the strangest architectural wonders described in the 
Wars of Alexander. Refered to by one critic as ?the most bookish of Chaucer?s books,? 
the House of Fame is deeply, often frustratingly, multivalent: it is simultaneously a 
rumination on the vagaries of fame and literary production, an inquiry into the nature of 
writen and spoken auctorite, a genre-unraveling asault on the traditional medieval 
dream vision, and a focused asertion of the vernacular English text.
56
 The poem has 
                                                
56
 A. J. Minis, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Pres, 195), 183. 
Minis?s text provides the most comprehensive and cogent introduction to the slipery critical discourse on 
the House of Fame. Among other important studies, Sheila Delany has argued that The House of Fame 
enacts the strugle for ?a balanced intelectual position, one that could acomodate traditional belief and 
the skeptical atitude toward belief that was the inevitable result of.. logical investigations.? The 
intelectual position on which the poem setles, Delany argues, is ?skeptical fideism,? a pragmatic 
philosophy that acknowledges the intractable conflicts within ?the body of traditional knowledge that 
[confronts] the educated fourtenth century reader? even as it posits the supreme authority of the Christian 
faith itself to transcend them. Skeptical Fideism has, to a large degre, provided a structural blueprint for 
much criticism to folow; later writers have largely afirmed Delany?s argument that the poem deconstructs 
traditional textual authority but difered on what they put in its place. Options are as diverse as ?the 
individual vision or voice? (Miler), the voices of women (Kordecki), the reader (Terel, Amtower), the 
tension betwen orality and literacy (Arnovick), and even the disparity betwen the overarching 
?mythology of the midle ages? and the individual writen ?fiction? (Gelrich). Se Sheila Delany, 
Chaucer?s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 1972), 
3, 6; Jacqueline Miler, The Writing on the Wal: Authority and Authorship in Chaucer?s House of Fame,? 
30 
consistently stymied those who have tried to pin down its dominant philosophical and 
literary concerns; the auctores that Chaucer brings into conversation throughout the work 
are so numerous and so contradictory that they can not help but to undercut and subvert 
each other at every turn, guaranteing a kind of poetic and philosophical mutualy asured 
destruction. No one gets out of the House of Fame unscathed. 
In addition to its many other facets, the House of Fame is also a primer on 
medieval theories of sound and speech, and it is in that capacity that I wish to discuss it 
here. At the close of the poem?s second book, Gefrey is seized by a garulous, telepathic 
eagle who whisks him into the ether and toward the titular House of Fame. On the way, 
the eagle provides the terified dreamer with a leson in acoustics, explaining what sound 
is (?soun ys noght but eyr ybroken? [765]), what speech is (?spech is soun.. / And every 
speche that ys spoken, / Lowd or pryvee, foul or fair, / In his substance ys but air? [762-
68]), and the analogous relationship between music and the spoken word (?whan a pipe 
is blowen sharpe / The air ys twyst with violence .. / And ryght so breketh it when men 
speketh? [774-780]).  
The leson reaches its climax when the eagle ?proves? to Gefrey how ?every 
speche, or noyse, or soun? (783) arives at the House of Fame through a proces of 
?multiplicacioun? (784): 
?I preve hyt thus ? take hede now ? 
Be experience; for yf that thow 
                                                                                                                                            
Chaucer Review 17 (1982): 101; Lesley Kordecki, ?Subversive Voices in Chaucer?s House of Fame,? 
Exemplaria 1 (199): 53-7; Katherine Terel, ?Realocation of Hermeneutic Authority in Chaucer?s 
House of Fame,? Chaucer Review 31 (197): 279-290; Laurel Amtower, ?Authorizing the Reader in 
Chaucer?s House of Fame,? Philological Quarterly 79 (200): 273-291; Leslie Arnovick, ??In Forme of 
Speche? is Anxiety: Orality in Chaucer?s House of Fame,? Oral Tradition 1 (196): 320-45; Jese 
Gelrich, The Idea of the Book in the Midle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Pres, 1986), 168. 
31 
Throwe on water now a stoon, 
Wel wost thou hyt wol make anoon 
A litel roundel as a sercle, 
Paraunter brod as a covercle; 
And ryght anoon thow shalt se wel 
That whel wol cause another whel, 
And that the thridde, and so forth, brother, 
Every sercle causynge other.? (787-796) 
Despite Chaucer?s decision to put these words in the mouth of an enormous talking bird, 
the description is not mere poetic fancy; in fact, it is a close redaction of Boethius?s 
description of the physics of sound in De Institutione Musica. Even its central metaphor 
of the stone dropped into the pool is a recapitulation of Boethius: ?The same thing 
happens in sounds that happens when a stone, thrown from above, fals into a puddle or 
into quiet water. First it causes a wave in a very smal circle; then it disperses clusters of 
waves into larger circles, and so on until the motion, exhausted by the spreading out of 
waves, dies away.?
57
 Thus, we can understand these concentric circles of ?eyr ybroken? 
? these wheels of spoken language moving ?from roundel to compas? (798) ? to 
constitute for Chaucer?s readers the scientific underpinnings of medieval theories of 
acoustics. They ilustrate how speech works on a physical level. 
 There is a significant diference between the eagle?s description of speech, 
though, and the scientific acount provided by Boethius. The sixth-century philosopher 
describes a physics in which sound becomes increasingly weak as it travels outward from 
                                                
57
 Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, ed. Claude Palisca, trans. Calvin Bower (New Haven, CT: Yale 
University Pres, 1989), 21. Se also The Riverside Chaucer, 983-84 n.78-821. 
32 
its source, explaining that ?[t]he later, wider wave is always difused by a weaker 
impulse.?
58
 Chaucer?s fourtenth-century raptor, however, describes a physics in which 
speech ?up bereth .. through multiplicacioun? (818-20), amplifying in afect and force, 
expanding ever outward. And when those concentric rings of twisting air reach the 
House of Fame, the eagle explains, they cease to be air at al but become the very 
physical incarnations of their very speakers: 
?Whan any speche ycomen ys 
Up to the paleys, anon-ryght 
Hyt wexeth lyk the same wight 
Which that the word in erthe spak, 
Be hyt clothed red or blak; 
And hath so veray hys lyknese 
That speke the word, that thou wilt gese 
That it the same body be, 
Man or woman, he or she.? (1074-1082) 
Contrary to Boethius, who describes the wheels of sound atenuating as they move away 
from their source, Chaucer describes sound that, at its furthest distance from its origin, 
manifests itself most robustly. The spoken word that leaves a person?s mouth on the 
terestrial plane is reconstituted in the form of its speaker in the House of Fame itself; 
those words, in turn, become active. They ?stonden? (1214) and ?telen tales? (1198); 
they ?pleyen on an harpe? (1201) and make ?lowde mynstralcies? (1217) and ?doon her 
ententes / To make .. ymages? (1267-69). In Austin?s terms, we might suggest that the 
                                                
58
 Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, 21. 
33 
perlocutionary force of the speech acts described by Chaucer is to embody their own 
speakers. Despite the poem?s clear secular context, we might also recal John 1:14: ?Et 
Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis [And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt 
among us]? ? a perlocutionary act sui generis.
59
 Whether philosophicaly or scripturaly, 
Chaucer (through his narative proxy Gefrey) clearly imagines a paradigm of speech in 
which the spoken word not only re-presents its world but re-creates it. 
 At the House of Fame?s Labyrinth of Rumor ? a structure that Chaucer describes 
as a ?Domus Dedaly .. ful of rounynges and of jangles? (1920, 1960) ? the physics of 
sound and speech that the eagle describes are renacted on the level of spoken narative, 
the level of gossip and rumor and story. Within the whirling maze, utterances that have 
taken the forms of their speakers tel their tales (tel themselves?) to other embodied 
utterances, and those utterances in turn change and enlarge and amplify those tales until, 
like the wheels of language, they reach the edge of their wicker cage: 
When oon had herd a thing, ywis, 
He com forth ryght to another wight, 
And gan him telen anon-ryght 
The same that to him was told, 
Or hyt a forlong way was old, 
But gan somewhat for to eche 
To this tydynge in this speeche 
More than it ever was. 
                                                
59
 Latin Vulgate cited from the Biblia Sacra: Juxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. Robert Weber (Stutgart: 
Deutsche Bibelgeselschaft, 1969). The English Translation is from the Douay-Rheims version, revised by 
Richard Chaloner (1582-1609; repr., Baltimore: John Murphy, 189). 
 
34 
.. 
And evermo with more encres 
Than yt was erst. (2060-68, 2074-75) 
As with the ?sound waves? described by the eagle, the proces of rumor within the 
labyrinth is a proces of constant ?encres? and amplification, one where narative voices 
perpetualy reproduce themselves, beget their own duplicates, and even create new 
embodied  utterances ? naratives of ?fals and soth compounded? (2108). The embodied 
speech acts here are exposed as not only reflections of their speakers but as active, 
creative, generative agents. They are performative speech acts manifest, spoken words 
that, in the most literal possible sense, do work on their world. 
 What the eagle?s acount of the motion of sound toward the House of Fame 
implies -- both in the capacity of the human voice to break and rend the air with violence 
as wel as in the more fanciful notion that speech ?wexeth lyk the same wight? who spoke 
it on earth ? is that the spoken word is an active, capable, powerful agent. As Chaucer?s 
description of the chatering sounds in the Domus Dedaly indicates, speech not only 
repeats and reflects the world, it amplifies the world, changes the world, and sometimes 
(as the half-truths slipping through the wicker cage and back into the sublunary sphere 
show) creates new worlds that didn?t exist before. And while I do not mean to suggest 
that Chaucer intended for his fantastic dream vision to be taken literaly, I do argue that 
we can understand the House of Fame as arising from a perception in the Middle Ages 
that the spoken word was uniquely powerful, that speech both represented creation and 
created in equal measure. I propose, therefore, that we can se the concentric wheels of 
language that Chaucer?s eagle describes as an apt metaphor for the speech that this 
35 
disertation locates in the poetry of the fourtenth and fiftenth centuries, speech whose 
power lies not only in its ability to travel and to comunicate but also in its ability to 
?twyst? and to ?break,? to engender and to create. 
 In many ways it is appropriate that Chaucer provide us with a guiding example for 
understanding Middle English conceptions of speech. Certainly he is not alone in 
regarding speech as an eficacious and performative medium; as this study wil show, 
both the Erkenwald poet and Thomas Hoccleve ? as wel other writers that I engage with 
more peripheraly such as Wiliam Langland, John Gower, and the anonymous poet of 
the Wars of Alexander ? similarly recognize the spoken word as a vehicle both for 
communication and for creation. But as his body of work shows, Chaucer is intensely 
aware of the preminence of speech both as a representative medium and as a creative, 
performative one. The power of the spoken word is an isue that Chaucer deals with 
across his poetic oeuvre, from the self-generating speech of the House of Fame, to the 
consequences of oaths made and broken in Troilus and Criseyde, to the dialectical 
birdsong that pervades The Parliament of Fowls, and even to the curse in ?Adam 
Scriveyn? that Chaucer utters to his own scribe: ?thou most have the scale? (3).  
But it is, of course, the Canterbury Tales that seals Chaucer?s reputation as a poet 
of speech, a poet who understands that people both make and are made by the words they 
speak. Marshal Leicester writes that the Canterbury Tales ?concentrate not on the way 
prexisting persons create language but on the way language creates people. They detail 
how a fictional teler?s text im-personates him or her by creating a personality, that is, a 
textual subject that acts like, rather than is, a person.?
60
 Indeed, just as the expanding 
                                                
60
 H. Marshal Leicester, Jr., The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales, 
(Berkeley: University of California Pres, 190), 9-10. 
36 
wheels of language give form in the Labyrinth of Rumor to ?shipmen and pilgrimes, .. 
pardoners, / Currours, and eke mesagers? (HF 2122-28), so too does the speech of the 
Shipman, the Pardoner, the Canon?s Yeoman, and the Manciple, ventriloquized through 
the Canterbury Tales?s pilgrim narator, ultimately give form to the Canterbury pilgrims 
and to the fictive world they inhabit. In this respect, we can se the ?congregacioun of 
folk? (HF 2034) within the House of Fame?s Domus Dedaly as poetic forerunners of the 
procesion of ?sondry folk? on the road to Canterbury. The creative speech that the eagle 
describes in Chaucer?s early dream vision adumbrates the generative words of the poet?s 
last major work. 
Among the poets discussed in this disertation, Chaucer is the poet of speech par 
excelence; in many ways his House of Fame and Canterbury Tales represent the alpha 
and omega of his engagement with the eficacy of the spoken word. Fiting, then, that in 
the first chapter of this disertation we turn from Chaucer?s early dream vision to the final 
poetic tale of his final, unfinished work ? from the talking eagle of the House of Fame to 
the talking crow of the Manciple?s Tale. 
 
37 
CHAPTER 1 
 
?A wiked tonge is worse than a fend?: 
Nominalism, Spech, and Power in The Manciple?s Tale 
 
Near the beginning of his tale, Chaucer?s Manciple draws a teling comparison between 
?Phebus, that was flour of bachilrie? (IX. 125) and ?the kyng of Thebes, Amphioun, / 
That with his syngyng waled that cite? (IX.116-117) Ostensibly made to highlight the 
beauty of Phoebus?s ?clere voys? (IX 115), the Manciple?s comparison is important not 
only for what it includes but for what it neglects to mention ? the role of Amphion?s lyre 
in the construction of the city wals. The tradition that Amphion built the wals of Thebes 
by playing his lyre was readily available to Chaucer and his contemporaries, and it was 
one that the poet undoubtedly knew wel. In Boccacio?s Teseida ? Chaucer?s primary 
source for the Knight?s Tale and the Anelida ?Amphion ?cal[s] upon the surrounding 
mountains to protect Thebes with the sweet song of [his] skilfully played lyre?; in 
Statius?s Thebaid, the Thebans tel ?of stones that crept to the sound of a Tyrian lyre and 
Amphion animating hard rocks.?
1
 More to the point, Chaucer himself aludes to 
Amphion?s skil as a harpist in the Merchant?s Tale: his description of January and May?s 
lavish wedding feast includes an acount of ?instrumentz of swich soun / That Orpheus, 
ne of Thebes Amphioun, / Ne maden nevere swich a melodye? (IV 1715-17). Michela 
                                                
1
 Giovani Bocacio, Theseid of the Nuptials of Emilia (Teseida dele Noze di Emilia), ed. and trans. 
Vincenzo Traversa (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 202), 40, Italian at 134; Statius, Thebaid, ed. and 
trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey for The Loeb Clasics Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 203), 
21, Latin at 20, 2. Richard Hofman argues that Chaucer also would have known the role of Amphion?s 
lyre from Ovid?s Metamorphoses. Se Ovid and the Canterbury Tales (Philadelphia: University of 
Pensylvania Pres, 196), 152. 
38 
Grudin has rightly noted that the Manciple?s description of Amphion?s voice is among 
those pasages in the Manciple?s Tale ?that point us to the general area of speech, poetry, 
and song, but in light of Amphion?s conspicuously absent lyre, her argument doesn?t go 
far enough.
2
 The Manciple?s invocation of Amphion waling Thebes with his voice 
suggests the potential of the spoken word ? and the spoken word alone ? to perform 
work, to efect change within the physical world rather than simply to reflect that world 
in a representative fashion. 
In modern critical parlance, we might refer to Amphion?s song as a performative 
utterance ? a speech act in which, as J. L. Austin writes, ?the uttering of the sentence is, 
or is a part of, the doing of an action.?
3
 As a brief synopsis should demonstrate, such 
performative utterances are among the varieties of speech acts present in the Manciple?s 
Tale, a work that, like the House of Fame, is self-evidently invested in the functions of 
spoken language. A wry recasting of Ovid?s story of Apollo and the Crow, the tale told 
by the Manciple centers on Phoebus, the clear-voiced god of poetry, and a snow-white 
crow that he has taught to ?countrefete the speche of every man? (IX 134). While his 
master is absent, the crow espies Phoebus?s wife and her ?leman? as ?they wroghten al 
hir lust volage? (IX 239).  Upon Phoebus?s return the crow first cries ?Cokkow! 
Cokkow! Cokkow!? and then, les punningly, lays bare the wife?s adultery using the 
human speech that Phoebus has taught him. This situation does not end wel for anyone. 
The enraged Phoebus kils his wife with an arow, then, too late, repents of his violence. 
He breaks his bow in grief, destroys ?his mynstralcie,? and ? in an act of either wishful 
                                                
2
 Michela Pasche Grudin, Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 
1996), 151 
3
 Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 5. 
39 
thinking, utter denial, or rampant self-delusion ? declares his wife to be ?ful gilteles? 
(IX 277) of her adultery. Finaly, in a culminating act of destruction, Phoebus punishes 
the crow for his ?fals tale? (IX 293): he plucks the crow?s white feathers, turns him black, 
and strips him of the ability to speak.  
Introduced by a prologue in which Chaucer?s drunken Cook loses his own ability 
to speak, punctuated by the Manciple?s sardonic observations on the relationship between 
the ?word? and the ?dede? (IX 208), and concluded by a paradoxicaly verbose cal to 
silence, the Manciple?s Tale offers a de facto exploration of the potentia of spoken 
language, an interogation into the work that a verbal utterance might perform. And that 
work, the Manciple sems to tel us, is as dangerous as it is significant: the spoken word 
can build a city, expose a betrayal, turn a crow black, enrage a god, lead to murder. As 
Christopher Cannon has argued, for Chaucer ? and certainly for his proxy the Manciple ? 
?language was the kind of thing which might not only describe, but could make, a 
world.?
4
 
Tempting as it is simply to read the Manciple?s Tale through the lens of modern 
speech-act theory, we must recognize that J. L. Austin and his followers were hardly the 
first to consider the fraught relationship between words and things. Chaucer?s own 
fourtenth century witnesed to a seismic shift in philosophical inquiry, precipitated 
largely by the teachings of the nominalist thinker Wiliam of Ockham, which complicated 
medieval understandings of that very relationship. At the heart of this philosophical shift 
was Ockham?s argument that ?a universal is not something real that exists in a subject .. 
                                                
4
 Christopher Canon, ?Chaucer and the Value of Language? (paper presented at the inaugural London 
Chaucer conference, Schol of Advanced Studies, University of London, UK, April 202). I am grateful to 
Christopher Canon for generously providing me with a copy of his paper. 
40 
[but] has a being only as a thought-object in the mind.?
 5
 Such a pronouncement was 
directly at odds with dominant strains of medieval scholastic realism ? exemplified by the 
writings of Augustine, Boethius and, later, Aquinas ? which held that universals ?exist 
outside the mind as the esences of individual things in which they inhere, at once distinct 
from the individual itself and from other universals.?
6
 Ockham?s rejection of universals 
and atendant emphasis on the ontological primacy of the individual had important 
consequences for late medieval thought. Linguisticaly, such a philosophical shift 
demanded a reappraisal of the relationship between the signifier and the signified because 
the signified was no longer understood as being predicated upon a larger, transcendent 
universal. Similarly, Ockham?s theories caled for a revised understanding of the very 
nature of God?s power and of His relationship with mankind. To that end, Ockham 
reasoned that because the wil of God was not fetered by a system of absolute universals, 
God?s ordained power (potentia dei ordinata) was superseded by His more robust (and 
more eratic) absolute power (potentia dei absoluta). 
Chaucer?s own views on Ockham?s philosophy are, as the self-contradictory 
critical record shows, notoriously dificult to discern; it is impossible to say with certainty 
if (or to what degre) Chaucer himself had nominalist leanings. We do know, however, 
that Ockham?s writings profoundly influenced many of the leading philosophical and 
intelectual figures of the fourtenth century, including Robert Holcot, John Wyclif, and 
Ralph Strode, very likely the same ?philosophical Strode? (TC 5.1857) mentioned in 
Chaucer?s Troilus and Criseyde. We can reasonably asume, therefore, that Chaucer 
                                                
5
 From Ordinatio, in Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 41. 
6
 Gordon Lef, Wiliam of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (Manchester, UK: 
Manchester University Pres, 1975), 104. 
41 
knew of the nominalist debate and that he engaged with it in his work.
7
 In this chapter, I 
contend that the Manciple?s Tale ? a work often overlooked in discussions of Chaucer 
and nominalism ? stands as the apogee of that engagement within the Canterbury Tales. 
More specificaly, I wil argue, first, that the aspects of performative speech we find in 
the Manciple?s Tale are central to Chaucer?s exploration of nominalist thought and, 
second, that the linguistic and ontological systems Chaucer develops in the tale are 
themselves logical extensions of the philosophy propounded by Ockham. Finaly, an 
analysis of Chaucer?s Boethian lyrics and Treatise on the Astrolabe offers a new 
perspective on the poet?s own position within the realist-nominalist debate by 
demonstrating his fraught position between two colliding and mutualy exclusive 
linguistic and ontological systems. 
 
Ockham and Chaucer: the Philosophical and Critical Background 
Ockham?s nominalist intervention in medieval philosophy must be understood not 
only in terms of what it proposed but also in terms of what it overturned: specificaly, the 
prevailing current of scholastic thought known as the via antiqua. A synthesis of patristic 
writings, Neoplatonic thought, and Aristotelianism, the via antiqua both ?recognized a 
harmony of faith and reason in theological isues? and ?conformed to the tradition and 
beliefs of a Christian society.?
8
 Among its metaphysical underpinnings was a belief in 
the existence of universals, divine constructs described by Augustine as the exemplary 
                                                
7
 For a thorough analysis of ways in which Chaucer might have come into contact with nominalist 
philosophy se Rusel Peck, ?Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions,? Speculum 53 (1978): 743-74, and 
John Micheal Crafton, ?Emptying the Vesel: Chaucer?s Humanistic Critique of Nominalism,? Literary 
Nominalism and the Theory of Rereading Late Medieval Texts: A New Research Paradigm 1 (195): 17-
19. 
8
 Helen Ruth Andreta, Chaucer?s Troilus and Criseyde: A Poet?s Response to Ockhamism (New York: 
Peter Lang, 197), 21. 
42 
?forms? or ?species? from which al individual forms were derived. The existence of 
these universals (as wel as their predicatory relationship to individuals) formed the core 
of what is known as scholastic realism: 
We can cal the Ideas ?forms? or ?species.? .. For Ideas are certain 
principal, stable and imutable forms or reasons of things. They are not 
themselves formed, and hence they are eternal and always stand in the 
same relations, and they are contained in the divine understanding. And 
although they neither arise nor perish, nevertheles everything that is able 
to arise and perish, and everything that does arise and perish, is said to be 
formed in acordance with them.
9
 
The Platonism implicit in such thinking is clear: Augustine posited the existence of a 
stratum of perfect and unatainable ideals, divine models that existed beyond the senses 
but upon which al known individual things were necesarily based. To know something, 
Augustine reasoned, was to know the universal, not the individuals derived from it. And 
since these universals were beyond the sensory apprehension of humans, that knowledge 
was ultimately gained through a proces akin to divine ilumination. Indeed, Augustine 
proposed that knowledge was granted directly by the wil of God, that with His power, 
the ?inner and inteligible eye? was ?drenched in a certain way and lit up by that 
inteligible light.?
10
 We know a thing because God reveals its universal esence to us, 
because He iluminates the universal that is always the basis of the individual. 
                                                
9
 Augustine, On Eighty-Thre Diferent Questions, 383-4. A concise description of scholastic realism 
apears in Robert Myles, Chaucerian Realism (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 194), 2-3. 
 
10
 Augustine, On Eighty-Thre Diferent Questions, 384 
43 
The ontological system articulated by Augustine gave form to a similarly situated 
epistemology of language, one in which the signified and the sign asumed the same 
relative hierarchy as the universal and the individual: the sign was always predicated 
upon the signified. Within this hierarchy, the function of speech was, quite simply, to 
signify ? to state and to communicate the knowledge granted by God?s ilumination. 
Moreover, Augustine argued that speech signified by convention; the spoken word was a 
sign that related to its signified not by some intrinsic relation but by external correlation. 
In De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine wrote that words existed exclusively in the service 
of such signification. As a sign, a word ?is a thing which of itself makes some other 
thing come to mind?; the subordinate relationship of sign to signified was a part of the 
?permanent and divinely instituted system of things.?
11
 In De Magistro, Augustine 
expanded this argument, proposing that ?things signified are of greater importance than 
their signs? and that ?the knowledge is superior to the sign simply because it is the end 
toward which the later is the means.?
12
 Such pasages show how the subordination of 
the individual to the universal made explicit by Augustine?s Platonist ontology was 
recapitulated in the subordination of the individual verbal sign to the universal signified. 
 A century after Augustine, Boethius?s translations of Aristotle precipitated the 
development of a similar theory of universals as wel as a similar linguistic epistemology. 
Central to Boethius?s approach was the idea that ?spoken sounds are symbols of 
afections in the soul, and writen marks symbols of spoken sounds,? a formulation, 
originaly propounded in Aristotle?s De Interpretatione, that posited the existence of 
                                                
11
 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans R. P. H. Gren (Oxford: Clarendon Pres, 195), 57, 
13. 
12
 Augustine, ?De Magistro,? in Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. and trans John H. S. Burleigh 
(Philadelphia: The Westminster Pres, 1953), 87-88. 
44 
mental, spoken, and writen signs.
13
 Boethius maintained that mental signs (also caled 
conceptual signs) bore a natural and intrinsic relationship to the things they signified. By 
contrast, spoken language consisted of a system of conventional signs, not natural ones.  
Speech was sen as signifying ?only derivatively, by a conventional .. correlation with 
concepts?; it was, thus, a system of signifiers subordinated first to natural mental signs 
and then to the universals that they signified.
14
 Indeed, in his translation of Aristotle, 
Boethius explained that words ?spoken in isolation are names and signify something. For 
he who speaks [them] establishes an understanding and he who hears [them] rests.?
15
  
The capacity of the spoken word to function ? to signify a mental concept ? was therefore 
entirely dependent upon the shared linguistic conventions of speaker and hearer. Finaly, 
at the bottom of Boethius?s hierarchy of signifiers was the writen word, itself predicated 
by convention upon speech. Writing, then, held a tertiary position in Boethius?s 
linguistic hierarchy; it was a conventional sign of a conventional sign (spoken) of a 
natural sign (mental) of a universal. 
Boethius?s tripartite hierarchy acorded with the Augustinian notion that 
universals both existed and formed the ontological basis for human knowledge. More 
important, it reinforced the hierarchical relationships between sign and signified implicit 
in Augustine?s discussion of speech and language. But the frameworks proposed by 
Augustine and Boethius did not mesh perfectly. Many philosophers influenced by 
Boethius?s translations of Aristotle, for example, rejected Augustine?s epistemology of 
                                                
13
 Aristotle, De Interpretatione in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. 
Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pres, 1984), 1:25. 
14
 Paul Vincent Spade, ?The Semantics of Terms,? in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval 
Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzman, Anthony Keny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Pres, 1982), 189. 
15
 Boethius, De Interpretatione, quoted in Spade, ?The Semantics of Terms,? 18. 
45 
divine ilumination, prefering instead to se ?concept formation dependent upon sense 
experience, and knowledge of inteligible realities subsequent to knowledge of sensible 
realities.?
16
 Linguisticaly, too, the two traditions were subject to some disjuncture. Was 
a spoken word a sign of the universal esence or was it the signifier for the individual 
derivation of the signified? Was language itself, as many Aristotelian thinkers proposed, 
important to the human ability to apprehend knowledge of universals or could such 
knowledge only be obtained by the ilumination of God? Did spoken signs hold a natural 
relationship to things signified or a conventional one (a position advocated by neither 
Boethius nor Augustine but articulated in Plato?s Cratylus)?
17
   
Later thinkers, none more significant than Thomas Aquinas, struggled to align the 
many ?smal misfits? that occurred between the Augustinian and Boethian frameworks.
 18
  
Aquinas?s Summa Theologica taught that ?words relate to the meaning of things signified 
through the medium of the intelectual conception... We can give a name to anything in 
as far as we can understand it.?
19
 Such an asertion supposed, with Augustine, that the 
individual signifying utterance existed in an ordered, subordinate relationship to the thing 
it signified. It also suggested that language itself operated as ?a rational, rule-governed 
system that .. [conveyed] the information necesary for organized knowledge,? a position 
                                                
16
 Ashworth, ?Language and Logic,? 82. 
17
 Se Ashworth, ?Language and Logic,? 83-34; G. R. Evans, Philosophy and Theology in the Midle Ages 
(New York: Routledge, 193), 36-37; Spade, ?The Semantics of Terms,? 18-196. The position that signs 
existed in a natural relationship with their signified is a position known as ?cratylic realism? or ?cratylistic 
realism? and should not be confused with scholastic realism. Se Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 2-3; G?rard 
Genete, ?Val?ry and the Poetics of Language,? in Josu? V. Harari, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in 
Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Pres, 1979), 359-363; Theresa Coleti, 
Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs, and Modern Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Pres, 198), 
19-20. 
18
 Evans, Philosophy and Theology, 37. 
19
 Thomas Aquinas, Suma Theologica, ed. and trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. 
(Westminster, MD: Christian Clasics, 1981), 1:60 (I, q. 13, a. 1). 
46 
more in keeping with Boethius?s Aristotelian leanings.
20
 Aquinas also afirmed the 
existence of universals ? a precept common to both schools of thought ? reasoning that 
?the inteligible species is that which is understood secondarily; but that which is 
primarily understood is the object, of which the species is the likenes.?
21
 Here too, the 
knowledge of the derivative individual (the species) was subordinated to knowledge of 
the universal (the object). 
Because scholastic realism of the via antiqua was, broadly speaking, stil the 
prevailing philosophical framework in the fourtenth century, comparatively few critics 
have argued specificaly that Chaucer?s work evinces a realist philosophy.
22
 Indeed, the 
vast majority of Chaucer?s readers have silently, even unconsciously, acepted the poet as 
a realist without overtly defending that asumption. Among those who have actively 
advocated for a realist Chaucer, Gerald Morgan has cast the widest net, arguing that the 
portraits in the General Prologue function as universal exemplars for the individual 
pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales. He argues that a philosophical discussion of universals 
ultimately becomes ?a sound basis for discriminating between the type and the 
individual? in the Canterbury Tales, a critical position that efectively reads Chaucer?s 
entire poem as, on one level, an extended realist alegory.
23
 David Wiliams ses 
evidence of a realist ontology specificaly in the Friar?s Tale, reasoning that Chaucer?s 
                                                
20
 E. J. Ashworth, ?Language and Logic,? in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. S. 
McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 203), 7. 
21
 Aquinas, Suma Theologica, 1:434 (I, q. 85, a. 2). 
22
 David Wiliams writes, ?The debate concerning suposition is, then, a debate about the signifying power 
of language and about the nature of the real. Scholastic logic of the fourtenth century dominated that 
debate but not to the complete exclusion of other discourses.? Se ?From Gramar?s Pan to Logic?s Fire: 
Intentionality in Chaucer?s Friar?s Tale,? in Literature and Ethics: Esays Presented to A. E. Maloch, ed. 
Gary Wihl and David Williams (Kingston, ON: McGil ? Quens University Pres, 198), 83. 
23
 Gerald Morgan, ?The Universality of the Portraits in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,? 
English Studies 58 (197): 481. 
47 
story of a summoner damned by his own failure to perceive the universal intent behind an 
individual curse presents ?a world in which the signified escapes false signs and reaserts 
an ontology of realism.?
24
 But by far the most strident proponent of a realist Chaucer is 
Robert Myles, who states flatly that ?Chaucer?s works reveal a foundational .. and 
linguistic realist?; within them, ?signs, including .. language in particular, are, to some 
degre, a reliable means of knowing [an] extramental reality.?
25
 
 The absolutenes with which Myles?s declares Chaucer?s realism, the unwavering 
certainty that he ascribes to the poet?s philosophical position, need not tempt us to 
counter with a postmodern Chaucer (or as Myles puts it, a ?schizophrenic? Chaucer). But 
we should nonetheles acknowledge what the vast majority of critics since E. Talbot 
Donaldson have shown and what Myles sems to overlook: that by cloaking himself in 
personae and alternately donning the masks of satirist, translator, and courtly apologist, 
Chaucer makes it extremely dificult for his readers to separate the ?real Chaucer? from 
the many Chaucers projected by his works. To put such an argument into terms that 
resonate with this argument, we might say that readers have long struggled to distinguish 
the universal Chaucer upon which are predicated so many individual Chaucers. Even 
without aces to the ?universal Chaucer? though, elements of scholastic realism can be 
found throughout the Canterbury Tales. We might, for example, consider the Knight?s 
Tale to extol an esentialy realist philosophy, one expresed eloquently in Theseus?s 
?Firste Movere? speech: 
                                                
24
 David Wiliams, ?From Gramar?s Pan,? 90. 
25
 Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 1. For other explicitly realist perspectives on Chaucer?s work se Andreta, 
Chaucer?s Troilus and Criseyde; Crafton, ?Emptying the Vesel: Chaucer Humanistic Critique of 
Nominalism?; James I. Wimsat, ?John Duns Scotus, Charles Sanders Pierce, and Chaucer?s Portrayal of 
the Canterbury Pilgrims,? Speculum 71 (196): 63-645. 
48 
?Wel may men knowe, but it be a fool, 
That every part diryveth from his hool, 
For nature hat nat taken his bigynnyng 
Of no partie or cantel of a thyng, 
But of a thyng that parfit is and stable.? (I 3005-09)
26
 
Here, Chaucer redacts a Boethian ontology in which individual parts ?diryveth from his 
hool,? and in which the whole in turn has ?his bigynnyng? in a ?thyng that parfit is and 
stable.? Such a realist ontology receives a more Aristotelian treatment in the Melibee, a 
tale in which knowledge of the transcendent universals ordained by ?God, of whom 
procedeth al vertu and ale goodnese? (VII 1872) is atained not by sudden ilumination 
bestowed by the ?Firste Movere? but by means of a rigorous scholastic dialectic between 
Melibee and Prudence. 
Evidence of scholastic realism also surfaces in the linguistic hierarchy that 
Chaucer develops in the Canterbury Tales, a hierarchy thrown into particularly sharp 
relief by the fates of those who atempt to violate it.  Indeed, in several of the Tales, 
individual characters either fail to abide by or refuse to recognize the coherence between 
spoken sign, mental sign, and universal that defines scholastic realism ? a failure for 
which many of them are punished. Wiliams implies just such a punishment when he 
suggests that the corrupt summoner of the Friar?s Tale is damned to hel for his 
?eroneous and self-serving theory of signification,? a theory in which ?universals are 
only names made up from knowledge of particulars? and in which ?signs have no 
                                                
26
 For the opinion that the overt realism of this pasage constitutes an ironic (and therefore nominalist) 
statement on the arbitrary fates of Palamon and Arcite, se Wiliam A. Cozart, ?Chaucer?s Knight?s Tale: A 
Philosophical Re-apraisal of a Medieval Romance,? in Medieval Epic to the ?Epic Theater? of Brecht, ed. 
Rosario P. Armato and John . Spalek (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Pres, 1968), 30-6. 
49 
necesary relation to their signified.?
27
 Wiliams?s reading of the damnation of the 
Friar?s summoner is equaly applicable to the Pardoner?s ?riotoures thre? (VI 661), who 
sek out the ?privee theef men clepeth Deeth? (VI 675) in order to slay him. Like the 
Friar?s misguided summoner, the Pardoner?s thre ?riotoures? fail to se that the death 
they sek is not an individual caled Death but an imutable universal. Their failure ? or 
unwilingnes ? to apprehend the connection betwen a speech act (the word ?death? 
uttered in the tavern) and the universal transcendent concept that it necesarily signifies 
ultimately leads the thre men to murder one another, literaly leads them to death. 
Finaly, we might consider the fate of the Apius, the corrupt judge of the Physician?s Tale 
who atempts to subvert the linguistic hierarchy of scholastic realism by verbaly 
declaring Virginia to be not Virginius?s daughter (which, of course, al the major figures 
in the tale know her to be) but Claudius?s servant. By atempting to predicate the mental 
sign of Virginia?s identity upon his own speech act rather than vice versa, Apius threatens 
to upend the relationship between speech and mental sign, even to trouble the relationship 
between spoken language and the transcendent universal upon which it is constituted. 
Ultimately, this transgresion leads to Virginia?s death, Claudius?s exile, and Apius?s 
own suicide; and it places the Physician?s Tale among the ranks of Chaucer?s bloodiest 
tales. In fact, the only character to emerge unscathed from the Physician?s Tale is 
Virginius himself, a figure whose faith in an inflexible universal order is so profound that 
he beheads his own daughter rather than submit to Apius?s atack on the linguistic 
hierarchy of scholastic realism. 
                                                
27
 Wiliams, ?From Gramar?s Pan,? 85-86. 
50 
The nominalist philosopher Wiliam of Ockham alows us to further unpack 
Chaucer?s relationship to fourtenth-century theories of language; ultimately, his work 
wil be central to our analysis of the Manciple?s Tale itself. The position articulated by 
Ockham constituted a radical break from the realist philosophy of the via antiqua, but it 
shared with that philosophy an acknowledgement of the distinctions among mental, 
spoken, and writen signs articulated by Boethius. Like most of his contemporaries ? 
realist and nominalist alike ? Ockham proposed that speech maintained a secondary 
relationship to the mental sign and, moreover, that speech signified the mental sign only 
by conventional correspondence. Ockham also acepted that mental signs ? what 
Boethius would cal ?impresions of the soul? ? signified the concepts upon which they 
were predicated naturaly rather than conventionaly: ?[mental signs] reside in the 
intelect alone and are incapable of being uttered aloud, although the spoken words which 
are subordinated to them as signs are uttered aloud.?
28
 But Ockham diverged sharply 
from his contemporaries on the question of exactly what those mental signs were 
predicated upon. Scholastic realists insisted that mental signs were natural signifiers of 
transcendent universals, divine signifieds upon which al individual things were based. 
By contrast, Ockham argued ?that every universal is one particular thing and that it is not 
a universal except in its signification, in its signifying many things.?
 29
 In other words, 
the mental sign did not signify a divine, inviolate signified; rather, the mental sign 
signified yet another kind of individual sign, an ?object of thought? that only semed to 
be a universal. 
                                                
28
 Wiliam of Ockham, Ockham?s Theory of Terms: Part I of the Suma Logicae, ed. and trans. Michael J. 
Loux (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Pres, 1974), 49-50. Se also Marilyn McCord Adams, 
Wiliam Ockham (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Pres, 1987), 71-75. 
29
 Ockham, Theory of Terms, 78; Adams, Wiliam Ockham, 75. 
51 
By this logic, Ockham efectively conflated the universal and the individual; the 
former, he reasoned, was another iteration of the later, a sign rather than a thing 
signified. More important, this logic also led Ockham to the conclusion that universals 
existed in name only and had no reality outside of the mind, a position that struck at the 
heart of the realist ontology: 
No universal is a substance regardles of how it is considered. On the 
contrary, every universal is an intention of the mind which, on the most 
probable acount, is identical with the act of understanding. Thus, it is 
said that the act of understanding by which I grasp [the concept] ?men? is 
a natural sign of men in the same way that weeping is a natural sign of 
grief. It is a natural sign such that it can stand for men in the same way 
that a spoken word can stand for things in spoken propositions.
30
 
In efect, Ockham demoted the universal from a transcendent signified to an individual 
cognitive construct, one which was itself predicated on human experience and 
observation. As such, the concept that realists caled a ?universal? was, in fact, 
coterminous with the mental sign. It was ?an intention of the mind? based upon 
signifieds outside of itself; it was not, as the realists held, ?capable of functioning 
[exclusively] as a predicate.? Indeed, as Ockham finaly concluded, ?no [individual] 
substance is ever predicated of anything [universal]?; the universals that realists 
understood to be eternal predicates of al things simply did not ? could not ? exist.
31
 
                                                
30
 Ockham, Theory of Terms, 81. I have atempted to clarify this dificult pasage by ading the bracketed 
words and by placing quotation marks around the word ?men.? 
31
 Ockham, Theory of Terms, 81-82. 
52 
Although a full survey of the implications of Ockham?s nominalism is outside the 
scope of this chapter, two isues arising from the philosopher?s rejection of universals 
warant further discussion for our analysis of Chaucer and, more specificaly, of his 
Manciple?s Tale.  The first is the efect of that rejection on medieval understandings of 
the relationship between epistemology and speech. As we have already observed, 
Ockham concurred with his realist contemporaries that speech signified mental signs by 
conventional correspondence in much that same way that writen words in turn signified 
spoken utterances: ? ?spoken words are used to signify the very things that are signified 
by concepts of the mind.?
32
 But whereas scholastic realism held that mental signs were 
in turn predicated upon transcendent universals, Ockham argued that those universals 
were themselves yet another ?intention of the mind,? coterminous with rather than 
generative of mental signs. For Ockham, the human knowledge derived from mental 
signs ? and by extension the spoken expresion of those mental signs ? was as variable as 
the individual things that those mental signs portended to signify. To know a thing was 
not tantamount to understanding the transcendent universal behind it but merely to 
understanding that individual thing as it was represented by a particular mental sign. To 
speak of something, therefore, did not mean to signify a mental sign anchored inexorably 
to a perfect and imutable signified but to signify a mental sign predicated solely upon 
other signs, including other spoken utterances. Thus, Ockham?s nominalist philosophy of 
language detached both knowledge and speech from a stable, overarching cohort of 
universals and radicaly redefined them as subject wholly to the internal mental proceses 
of the individual thinker. 
                                                
32
 Ockham, Theory of Terms, 50. Regarding spech, Ockham writes, ?The same sort of relation I [Ockham] 
have claimed to hold betwen spoken words and impresions or intentions or concepts holds betwen 
writen words and spoken words.? 
53 
Such a shift goes wel beyond the asertion, made by many who discuss 
Chaucer?s relationship to nominalism, that Ockham?s linguistic philosophy simply 
overturned the argument that language bore a natural, rather than a conventional, 
relationship to the things that it signified, a position known as cratylic realism.
33
 In fact, 
the vast majority of scholastic realists, including Aquinas and Duns Scotus, rejected 
cratylic realism, as, of course, did Ockham. Ockham?s intervention was not an asertion 
that speech signified mental signs by convention but rather that mental signs themselves 
were disconnected from a transcendent universal signified, a position which meant that 
knowledge was finaly ?not the result of generation, but of abstraction, which [was] only 
a kind of mental picturing.?
34
 Predicated upon the inherent vagaries of individual 
?intentions of the mind,? the mental sign was contingent only upon the individual 
creating it, a flimsy predicate indeed when we compare it to the imutable universals of 
realism. Speech was similarly destabilized. As one critic has pointed out, for Chaucer 
?Words could no longer be asumed to fit the shape of reality because of their origin in a 
real world of ideas beyond the mind. Language [was] no longer a shadow patern of the 
real, but [had] become a skewed grid that may not fit the scheme of reality.?
35
 Within the 
strictures of Ockham?s epistemological model, then, what a person thought he knew of 
reality, he did know of reality. More radicaly, we might also suggest that because 
mental signs were predicated not upon universals but only upon other signs, including 
signs of speech, spoken words could fundamentaly change that knowledge of reality and 
                                                
33
 Se Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 2-3. 
34
 From Ordinatio, in Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 41 
35
 Holy Walace Boucher, ?Nominalism: The Diference for Chaucer and Bocacio,? Chaucer Review 20 
(1986): 215. 
54 
even could, for the individual thinker, alter reality itself. In other words, at the extreme 
limit of Ockham?s nominalism, we se the ontological potential for performative speech. 
The same rejection of the universal that necesitated a shift in thinking about 
language and epistemology also had significant ramifications for nominalist 
understandings of God, a point underscored most emphaticaly by Ockham?s emphasis on 
God?s absolute and unmediated power ? potentia dei absoluta. Following the theological 
distinction popularized by (though not original with) Albert the Great and reinforced by 
John Duns Scotus, Ockham held that God?s power, though esentialy singular in nature, 
was of two species ? potentia ordinata and potentia absoluta.
36
  Potentia ordinata, God?s 
ordered power, refered to the power that God has to act without directly contradicting 
his own precepts, or, as Ockham put it, to act ?acording to the laws that are ordered and 
instituted by God.?
37
  Potentia absoluta, on the other hand, refered to the absolute power 
of God to act outside and even in contradiction of His own laws. In Ockham?s nominalist 
ontology, God Himself became the only real measure of such ideals as truth, right, and 
good ? inefable concepts that scholastic realists held to be derived from transcendent 
universals. By extension, physical laws, too, were predicated solely upon the wil and 
power of God. Without universals to govern the laws ?ordered and instituted by God,? 
His potentia ordinata efectively collapsed into His potentia absoluta: there was simply 
no space between the expresion of God?s wil within His laws and the expresion of 
God?s wil without them. In this way, Ockham?s ontology finaly ?[rendered] al 
creatures and things utterly contingent upon their creator not only for their existence but 
                                                
36
 Adams, Wiliam Ockham, 186-87 (for Albert the Great), 190-93 (for Duns Scotus). 
37
 Wiliam of Ockham, Quodlibeta, quoted in Adams, Wiliam Ockham, 198. 
55 
also for the circumstances that [governed] their existence.?
38
 By unbinding the individual 
from the universal, Ockham was forced instead to bind it to the unfetered and absolute 
power of God. 
Ockham?s insistence on God?s absolute power has become a locus of Chaucerian 
criticism. In one of the first significant studies of Chaucer and nominalism, Robert 
Stepsis writes that Walter in Chaucer?s Clerk?s Tale should be understood not as ?a 
human being, but as God, a God whose only recognizable trait is the absolute, unbounded 
fredom of His wil.? Griselda, in turn, should be read as ?an emblem of the patient 
human soul in its ideal response to the adversities visited on it by God.?
39
 Thus, the 
disturbingly sadistic Clerk?s Tale becomes an Ockhamist alegory demonstrating the 
inviolable and unconditional nature of potentia dei absoluta ? ?the fredom of the divine 
wil and the absolutenes of God?s power.?
40
 More recently, Roger Moore has linked 
nominalist concerns to Chaucer?s Man of Law?s Tale for similar reasons, noting that the 
tale ?displays litle evidence that God?s wil is just, merciful, or rational; it merely 
postulates that such a wil exists, and remains silent as to its inherent character.?
41
  
Although Ockham?s concept of potentia dei absoluta must be taken into acount when 
considering Chaucer?s approach to nominalism, I maintain that potentia dei absoluta is 
for Chaucer secondary to Ockham?s rejection of the universal and to the linguistic and 
                                                
38
 Wiliam H. Wats and Richard J. Utz, ?Nominalist Perspectives on Chaucer?s Poetry: A Bibliographical 
Essay,? Medievalia et Humanistica 20 (193): 148. 
39
 Robert Stepsis, ?Potentia Absoluta and the Clerk?s Tale,? Chaucer Review 10 (1975): 139, 129. Similar 
arguments are articulated in David Steinmetz, ?Late Medieval Nominalism and the Clerk?s Tale,? Chaucer 
Review 12 (197): 38-54, and Elizabeth Kirk, ?Nominalism and the Dynamics of the Clerk?s Tale: Homo 
Viator as Woman,? in Chaucer?s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson 
(Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 190), 11-20. 
40
 Stepsis, ?Potentia Absoluta,? 143. 
41
 Roger More, ?Nominalistic Perspectives on Chaucer?s ?Man of Law?s Tale,?? Comitatus 23 (193): 85. 
56 
epistemological diferences that stem directly from it. To be certain, Moore?s argument 
does mention the nominalist epistemology in which ?human reason can gain true 
knowledge only of particular, individualized objects,? but both Moore and Stepsis finaly 
place God?s potentia absoluta at the very center of their analysis of nominalism, 
marginalizing the most fundamental aspects of Ockham?s intervention in the proces.
42
  
In other words, by largely ignoring questions of language and epistemology and focusing 
only on God?s power, Stepsis and Moore approach nominalism at its periphery, seldom 
engaging with the fundamental isues at its heart. 
 A separate and more fruitful line of critical inquiry, however, has developed 
around those very epistemological and linguistic aspects of the nominalist intervention, 
aspects that asert themselves strongly in what Russel Peck cals Chaucer?s ?literary 
world .. filed with glossers and verbal manipulators who trick others and themselves 
with semantic disjunctions.? Peck writes that in Chaucer?s work, ?nominalistic thought 
makes one aware of the limitations of human perception and the likelihood of one?s being 
prisoner to his own ideas.?
43
 This observation resonates with the core proposition of 
Ockham?s philosophy: those things that are held to be transcendent universals are, in fact, 
?mentaly fashioned and abstracted from singular things previously known.?
 44
 P. B. 
Taylor also links Chaucer to nominalism; however, unlike Peck, who flatly declares 
Chaucer to be a nominalist thinker, Taylor portrays Chaucer as a frustrated realist who 
ses the tenets of his philosophical beliefs threatened by nominalist ideals. Taylor 
suggests that while Chaucer ?aspires toward a linguistic realism in which intent informs 
                                                
42
 More, ?Nominalistic Perspectives,? 86. 
43
 Peck, ?Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions,? 75, 757. 
44
 From Ordinatio, in Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 43. 
57 
deeds through the ministry of words,? that realist aspiration is repeatedly undercut both 
by ?the practice of the real world? and by the tales of his own pilgrims, which frequently 
?[mock] the idea that words should reflect intent.?
45
 Along these lines, Holly Boucher 
has suggested that Chaucer writes in full consciousnes that ?concepts and the words 
which expresed them had become relative? and that ?the firm bonds between signifier 
and signified .. had unraveled.? In the face of such nominalist notions, Boucher 
concludes, Chaucer had to concern himself with ?the new power of words to create 
autonomous worlds.?
46
 
 Boucher?s discussion of ?words? and worlds? provides a felicitous conjunction 
with the work of John Searle, particularly the distinction he draws between the 
performative utterance and a constative utterance based on the direction of fit between 
the word and the world.
47
  It is my contention that the connection between Ockham?s 
nominalism, which posits the ?power of words to create autonomous worlds,? and the 
performative speech act, in which words create the world they describe is not a 
suggestive anachronism; rather, it is fundamental to our understanding of the full 
implications of nominalism and its resonances in Chaucer?s poetic output. Indeed, 
performativity is implicit in the very linguistic and epistemological structures upon which 
nominalism insists. By predicating knowledge upon unverifiable and individual acts of 
?mental language? rather than upon a set of stable and transcendent universals, Ockham 
lays the groundwork for an ontology in which to think something is to know it, in which 
to know something is not necesarily to know it, and in which to speak of something can 
                                                
45
 P. B. Taylor, ?Chaucer?s Cosyn to the Dede,? Speculum 57 (1982): 325 - 26. 
46
 Boucher, ?Nominalism,? 215. 
47
 Se chapter 1 of Searle, Expresion and Meaning and ?How Performatives Work,? 535-558. 
58 
make it real. Within this radicaly disjointed ontology, the individual speech act becomes 
excedingly powerful. Persuasive speech becomes performative speech; to have one?s 
mind changed by another?s words is to have those words alter the very fabric of reality. 
In the proper circumstances, then, spoken words have the potential to create discrete 
individual realities for separate characters ? realities that we as readers may deem false, 
but that are nonetheles valid by the standards of Ockham?s nominalist paradigm. 
The Canterbury Tales provides no shortage of situations in which characters use 
spoken words to make individual realities out of otherwise objective falsehoods. In the 
Miler?s Tale, for example, Nicholas?s description of ?a reyn, and that so wilde and wood 
/ That half so gret was nevere Noes flood? (I. 3517-18) makes the coming of the second 
flood a reality for the carpenter John, and eventualy, the single word ?water? is enough 
to bring that same reality (quite literaly) crashing down around John?s head. More 
darkly, a priest in the Canon?s Yeoman?s Tale is convinced that base metals can be 
transformed into gold by the speech of an unscrupulous canon, a belief so real to him that 
he spends the exorbitant sum of forty pounds for the fraudulent secret. The Canterbury 
Tales offers countles other examples in which words more generaly perform work: 
Chauntecler is first trapped by the fox?s flatering words and then extricates himself by 
putting words into the fox?s mouth; a friar is bound by verbal contract to divide a fart 
evenly twelve ways; a loathly lady provides a rapist knight with the words that wil both 
save him from death and bind him to her; Dorigen traps herself into a liaison with 
Aurelius through her rashly pledged troth. Indeed, as a series of stories told by individual 
tale-telers, the entire Canterbury project takes on the mantle of performative speech. 
The ?reality? of the tales, after al, is solely a linguistic one; the words writen on the 
59 
page ? the words spoken by the pilgrims, as it were ? causaly precede the reality that 
they create. Who is Dorigen, for example, but the creation of a particular Franklin, and 
who is that Franklin but the (re)creation of the pilgrim narator, himself the creation of 
Chaucer? The repeated layering of author and authored, the very halmark of the 
Canterbury Tales itself, becomes both an exercise in performativity and an exploration of 
the principles of nominalist thought, an experiment in using words to create and recreate 
the divergent, individual worlds of the tales? speakers. 
 
Nominalism and the Manciple: ?The Word Moot Nede Accorde with the Dede? 
The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously remarked, ?If there is a gun 
hanging on the wal in the first act, it must fire in the last.?  Temporal distance from the 
Canterbury Tales notwithstanding, Chekhov?s aphorism is ilustrative for the structure of 
the Manciple?s Tale and provides a useful framework for analyzing Chaucer?s 
investigation of both the spoken word and the questions raised by Ockham?s nominalism. 
I contend that the Manciple?s alusion to Amphion?s voice is one of a number of pasages 
that, as Chekhov might say, hang the gun of language upon Phoebus?s wal. It is an 
alusion that implies the potential (even the inevitability) of speech to function 
performatively, but it does not actualy demonstrate or enact that particular function. 
Another pasage that suggests a potential function of speech (and a function vastly 
diferent from that implied by Amphion?s song) is the Manciple?s digresion on the 
futility of restraining those things ?that nature / Hath naturely set in a creature? (IX 
161-2): 
Tak any bryd, and put it in a cage, 
60 
And do al thyn entente and thy corage 
To fostre it tendrely with mete and drynke 
Of ale deyntes that thou kanst bithynke, 
And keep it al so clenly as thou may, 
Although his cage of gold be never so gay, 
Yet hath this brid, by twenty thousand foold 
Levere in a forest that is rude and coold 
Goon ete wormes and swich wrechednese. 
For evere this brid wol doon his bisynese 
To escape out of his cage, yif he may. 
His liberte this brid desireth ay. (IX 163-174) 
The Manciple amplifies his source text for this aside, Jean de Meun?s scholastic Romance 
of the Rose, to insist that ?nature? is paramount in determining the caged bird?s actions, a 
point that becomes critical to what sems to be an afirmation of the ontological 
underpinnings of scholastic realism. In the Manciple?s discussion of nature, we can se a 
tacit acknowledgement that the bird is predicated upon a transcendent universal ? an 
imutable ur-bird that serves a model for the individual and that determines its ?lust[s]? 
(IX 181), and its ?appetit[s]? (IX 182). Derived from and predicated upon a stable 
universal, the nature of the bird is something over which we have no control; it cannot be 
altered by ?mete and drynke? (IX 165) or by a ?cage of gold? (IX 168). 
The Manciple does not explicitly discuss language in this pasage, let alone 
speech in particular. Nonetheles, the realist ontology that he presents is important to the 
range of possibilities that he develops for the spoken word in his tale. This connection 
61 
becomes clear when we consider the afinities between the hypothetical ?bryd? of the 
Manciple?s digresion and the other bird in the tale, Phoebus?s crow. In his digresion, 
the Manciple describes a bird ?put.. in a cage? (IX 163) and expounds upon the futility 
of trying ?to fostre it? (IX 165) with meat, drink, and other human luxuries. Such 
?deyntes? (IX 166), the Manciple promises, wil never stop the bird from longing for its 
fredom, nor wil they curb its ?appetit? for ?wormes and swich wrechednese? (IX 
171). Like the Manciple?s ?bryd,? Phoebus?s crow ? whose propensity for eating worms 
and wretchednes might be extrapolated from the crow?s identification as a ?worm-foul? 
in Chaucer?s Parliament of Fowls ? hangs always in a cage.
 48
 Moreover, the crow 
ultimately obtains the fredom that the Manciple?s ?bryd? so desires when Phoebus slings 
him ?out at dore? (IX 306).
49
 Rather than being ?fostred? with ?mete and drynke? 
however, Phoebus?s crow is fostered with speech: 
Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a crowe 
Which in a cage he fostred many a day, 
and taughte it speken, as men teche a jay. 
The linguistic and structural paralels that the Manciple draws between his ?bryd? and 
Phoebus?s crow imply analogous paralels between the ?mete and drynke? with which the 
?bryd? is fostered and the ?speche? (IX 306) with which Phoebus fosters his crow. Thus, 
when the Manciple emphasizes the subordination of the meat and drink to the things 
nature has put in the bird (?Lo, heere hath lust his dominacioun? [IX 181]), he implies the 
concomitant subordination of speech. Like the cage of gold and the dainties offered the 
                                                
48
 Se PF 358-364. Also interesting in relation to the Manciple?s Tale, the Cucko is regularly the bird that 
speaks for the worm-fowls (PF 505-09, 603-09). 
49
 For the crow?s banishment by Phoebus as an escape to fredom, se Hugh White, ?Chaucer 
Compromising Nature,? Review of English Studies 40 (1989): 157-78. 
62 
bird, the spoken language in which the crow is nurtured is finaly inefective in the face 
of the lusts and appetites predicated upon the universal; it becomes a part of the faulty 
arsenal by which one might atempt to ?destreyne a thyng which that nature/ Hath 
naturely set in a creature? (IX 161-62). In this metaphorical construction, speech is, at 
best, a secondary representation of a universal signified. At worst, it is a means of 
mendacity and deception, a false signifier that atempts (but fails) to obscure that which is 
predicated upon nature. 
 Inert and inefective, the brand of speech that the Manciple?s discussion of the 
bird implies is a far cry from Amphion?s performative, city-building utterances. Rather, 
as speech that cannot efect change in the world ? speech that, to borow Searle?s 
vocabulary, cannot fit the world to the word ? it is constative in function. In terms more 
historicaly appropriate to the late Middle Ages, the Manciple invokes a model of speech 
that acords with the linguistic hierarchy of scholastic realism, a model in which the 
spoken utterance cannot change those afections within the bird because they are 
themselves predicated upon a stable, guiding universal ? upon nature. And though it 
might stretch this analogy too far to suggest that those things ?which that nature / Hath 
naturely set in a creature? function here as de facto mental signs, there is an important 
paralel between the two: both are predicated entirely upon transcendent, universal 
constructs. Those things put into the bird by ?nature? asume a hierarchical position that 
is analogous to that of the mental sign. Like Boethius?s ?afections in the soul,? they are 
derived from ?nature? through a proces of natural correspondence. 
If the Manciple implies the inviolable realist hierarchy of universal over mental 
sign over spoken word in his digresion on the bird, he invokes it explicitly in his second 
63 
long aside, his now infamous analysis of the ?lady? and the ?leman.? The Manciple 
telingly prefaces that analysis with a dictum from Plato?s Timeaus, probably redacted 
second hand from Jean de Meun?s Romance of the Rose: 
The word moot nede acorde with the dede. 
If men shal tele proprely a thyng, 
The word moot cosyn be to the werkyng.
50
   
The relationship between word and deed articulated in this brief pasage aligns neatly 
with the mainly ontological distinctions developed in Manciple?s discussion of the bird. 
More important, the pasage alows the Manciple to shift the ontological distinctions 
developed in the bird digresion firmly and overtly into the realm of the linguistic. The 
word is contingent here; the word must accord with, must be cousin to, the deed just as 
the bird must acord with nature. The ?werkyng? is signified; the word is sign. 
 From this Boethian-Platonist beginning, the Manciple articulates his most explicit 
case for a realist linguistic hierarchy. Specificaly, this is a hierarchy in which the spoken 
word signifies the mental sign and the mental sign in turn signifies the overarching 
universal: 
Ther nys no diference, trewely, 
Bitwixe a wyf that is of heigh degre, 
If of hir body dishonest she bee, 
And a povre wenche, other than this ? 
If it so be they werke bothe amys ? 
But that the gentile, in estat above, 
                                                
50
 Se Guilaume de Loris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, 319-20 (l. 47-49); also, Boece II 
pr. 12, 206-7 (in Riverside Chaucer). 
64 
She shal be cleped his lady, as in love; 
And for that oother is a povre womman, 
She shal be cleped his wenche or his leman. (IX 212-20) 
It is most fruitful to unpack the realist hierarchy that the Manciple depicts by starting at 
its top, at the universal. The Manciple insists that there is no diference between the two 
adulterous women in question except for their diference in status. The two social 
stations that the Manciple invokes here, I propose, function as universals, as overarching 
constructs that scholastic realists regarded as inviolate truths. For the purposes of clarity, 
we can follow the Manciple in refering to those universals as ?gentile? and ?povre,? but 
even as we do that, we must recognize that our naming of these constructs is a mater of 
rhetorical convenience; as universals, they have no existence in language. From the 
universals ?gentile? and ?povre? two distinct mental signs are derived. These ?thought 
objects? or ?afections in the soul? signify ?gentile? and ?povre? naturaly rather than by 
convention, and like their universal signifieds, they have no existence in the linguistic 
sphere. Finaly the mental signs act as predicates for the spoken signs that the Manciple?s 
hypothetical wommen are ?cleped? (from ?clepen? meaning ?to speak; cal, shout?).
51
  
Those spoken signs of ?leman? and ?lady? signify their respective mental signs only 
through conventional correspondence; the words themselves, while based on mental 
signs, are derived by a kind of cultural or social consensus. What is most important, 
however, is that even if they signify by convention, the spoken signs are predicated 
firmly upon mental signs that are in turn predicated upon stable universals: because one 
                                                
51
 Midle English Dictionary, s.v. ?clepen? v., 1(a). 
65 
woman is ?povre? she is caled a ?leman?; because the second woman is ?gentile? she 
is caled a ?lady.? 
 But how stable are those universals? Certainly, the Manciple constructs this 
careful hierarchy of signs and signifieds upon what appears to firm realist ground, but his 
initial asertion that ?Ther nys no diference? between the two women resonates with 
unusual force throughout his digresion, undercutting the very scholastic realism it 
portends to support.
52
 Indeed, the proposition that the two adulterous women are 
esentialy identical is dangerous to the realist ontology the Manciple develops precisely 
because it suggests that ?gentle? and ?povre? ? the universals from which the spoken 
signs ?lady? and ?leman? ultimately derive ? may not realy be universals at al, that 
they are not ?at once distinct from the individual itself and from other universals.?
53
 In 
fact, the stated samenes of the two women displaces what initialy appear to be 
universals, rendering them not inviolable signifieds but another set of mental signs, 
themselves predicated upon other signifieds. The key to understanding this slippage lies 
in the relationship between the mental sign and the universal, specificaly in the question 
of whether the mental sign signifies a universal signified (the realist approach) or whether 
it signifies other individual signs that, in the aggregate, sem to be a universal (the 
nominalist approach). What the Manciple reveals, even as he argues from an ostensibly 
realist ontology, is that the mental signs informing our speech are not as firmly grounded 
in the universal as scholastic realism insists. Rather, the universal itself may be subject to 
interference from other signs; it may not be a universal at al. Ultimately, the Manciple 
                                                
52
 Formaly and syntacticaly, Chaucer emphasizes the phrase ?ther nys no diference? (IX 212) both by 
repetition (?Ther is no diference? [IX 25]) and by separating it from the restrictive phrase ?other than 
this? with several aditional clauses. 
53
 Lef, Wiliam of Ockham, 104. 
66 
raises the possibility that, as Donald Howard has remarked, ?the only real diference 
[between the two women] is a diference of language? ? a nominalist philosophy.
54
 
Practicaly, the Manciple?s description of the ?lady? and the ?leman? presents 
us with something we might anachronisticaly refer to as a linguistic fedback loop: the 
diference in status between the two unfaithful women ensures that the noble woman is 
caled a lady while the poor woman is caled a leman; however, the speech acts ?lady? 
and ?leman? themselves reify and make palpable such a status diference, even when 
the two women are esentialy identical in their action. The Manciple?s own actions 
underscore the notion that speech functions in this circular capacity, that it 
simultaneously signifies and generates the distinctions upon which mental signs are 
based. It is, after al, his own utterance of the word ?leman? to which the Manciple 
reacts so strongly ? ?Certes this is a knavyssh speche!? (IX 205) ? not the act of adultery 
itself, which he discusses at length without apology (IX 187-195). In this ?fedback 
loop,? we can se the Manciple proposing a brand of speech that is neither wholly 
performative in nature nor wholly constative, a brand of speech that exists between the 
two on a continuum of verbal eficacy. Moreover, the power that the Manciple shows the 
spoken sign to have upon the mental sign alows us to identify the beginnings of an 
encroaching Ockhamist thread within the Manciple?s Tale. 
 
The thre pasages examined above ? the alusion to Amphion waling Thebes with his 
voice; the Manciple?s discussion of the things ?which that nature / Hath naturely set in 
a creature?; and the comparatively complex discussion of the ?lady? and the ?leman? ? 
                                                
54
 Donald Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Pres, 1976), 302. 
Se also A. S. G. Edwards, ?Chaucer and the Poetics of Uterance,? in Poetics: Theory and Practice in 
Medieval English Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Ana Torti (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 191), 6-7. 
67 
suggest a range of possibilities for speech, from the inert to the radicaly performative 
and to intermediate points in between. Taken together, they represent what Chekhov 
might cal the gun on the Manciple?s wal, the range of functions acorded to the spoken 
uterance in the Manciple?s Tale. And true to Chekhov?s words, that gun wil fire by act 
five.  
While Chekhov?s dramaturgical truism offers a heuristic for understanding the 
Manciple?s Tale, the idea behind the Russian playwright?s metaphor, that the second part 
of a literary work brings the first part to fruition, is not unique to him; scholars of 
medieval literature have used similar metaphors to describe the narative structure of 
poetry in the Middle Ages. A. C. Spearing, for example, argues that many medieval 
poems are ?comparable to .. a pictorial diptych? in that they consist of two equaly sized 
?leaves? which ?when put together.. incite the reader to participate in the creation of a 
meaning that is larger than either posseses in isolation.?
55
  Spearing cites Chaucer?s 
Book of the Duches and the aliterative poems Patience and Awntyrs off Arthure as such 
diptych poems; other critics have expanded that list to include Saint Erkenwald, Pearl, 
and Chaucer?s General Prologue.
56
 Chaucer?s Manciple?s Tale also exemplifies this 
diptych structure: the first leaf develops the potential of speech and the second leaf shows 
its deployment. Even more than the image of the diptych, however, Chekhov?s metaphor 
articulates the movements of invocation and completion, of potential and kinetic energy, 
that undergird the tale?s larger structure. 
                                                
55
 A. C. Spearing, ?Central and Displaced Sovereignty in Thre Medieval Poems,? Review of English 
Studies 3 (1982): 249. 
56
 Se Colin Wilcockson, ?The Opening of Chaucer?s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: A 
Diptych,? The Review of English Studies 50 (199): 345-50. 
68 
Just after the midpoint of the Manciple?s Tale, Phoebus?s crow sings, ?Cokkow! 
Cokkow! Cokkow!? (IX 243), an outburst that is important for two reasons. First, it 
begins to reveal the philosophical underpinnings of the Manciple?s linguistic philosophy; 
second, it starts to fulfil the potential that the first portion of the tale acords to speech ? 
to fire the gun.
57
 Their obvious punning aside, however, the thre words alone might be 
understood as nonsensical birdsong, as vox rather than dictio, sound rather than sense.
58
  
When Phoebus preses the crow on the meaning of his speech (?What, bryd?? quod 
Phebus. ?What song syngestow?? [IX 244]), the crow eliminates any ambiguity, 
reporting ?by sadde tokenes and by wordes bolde, / How that [Phoebus?s] wyf had doon 
hire lecherye? (IX 258-59). Initialy, the crow?s utterance appears to be a constative one, 
a statement that is subordinated to a stable truth (the wife?s infidelity) and that acurately 
reflects the mental signs predicated upon that truth (the crow?s knowledge of the wife?s 
infidelity). In fact, the Manciple endorses just such an interpretation by describing how 
the crow had stood mute witnes to the very act of infidelity: ?the white crowe, that 
heeng ay in the cage, / Biheeld hire werke, and seyde never a word? (IX 240-241). In 
this respect, the crow?s damning utterances evoke a realist linguistic ontology, one in 
which the spoken word is fully subordinated both to the mental sign and to the universal 
that backs it up. In relation to Phoebus, however, the statement functions diferently. 
Rather than following the linguistic hierarchy described by the realists, where spoken 
language signifies a mental sign that itself always signifies an inviolable universal, the 
                                                
57
 The crow sings ?Cokow! Cokow! Cokow!? at line 243; the mathematical midpoint of the Manciple?s 
Tale is line 23. 
58
 In the terminology of clasical gramarians, vox can be defined simply as ?vocal sound,? something that 
even animals had the power to produce; dictio can be defined as ?word.? Se History of Linguistics, 
Volume I: Clasical and Medieval Linguistics, ed. Giuilo Lepschy (New York: Longman, 194), 10, 97. 
69 
crow uses his speech to alter the terms of Phoebus?s mental signs, to alter the things 
Phoebus knows to be true. This ontological reversal violates the strict epistemological 
and linguistic hierarchy upon which scholastic realism insists. Instead of being 
predicated upon a stable universal, Phoebus?s mental signs are shown to be contingent 
upon the crow?s speech: the mental sign that causes Phoebus to kil his wife is 
engendered by the crow?s utterance, ?on thy bed thy wyf I saugh hym swyve? (IX 256). 
In this way, the Manciple?s Tale evokes a nominalist linguistic paradigm, one in which 
the mental sign is not connected to a transcendent universal but is derivative of other, 
more flexible signifieds. 
 After the enraged Phoebus murders his wife, the Manciple develops the 
nominalist current implied by the crow?s damning report stil further. The words that 
Phoebus speaks to the crow ? an unvarnished asertion of his own wife?s fidelity ? 
functionaly invert the crow?s earlier report of Phoebus?s cuckolding: 
?Traitour,? quod [Phoebus], ?with tonge of scorpioun, 
Thou hast me broght to my confusioun; 
Allas, that I was wroght! why nere I deed? 
O deere wyf! o geme of lustiheed! 
That were to me so sad and ek so trewe, 
Now listow deed, with face pale of hewe, 
Ful gilteles, that dorste I swere, ywys!? (IX 271-277) 
Scholars have disagred sharply on what exactly Phoebus is up to in this pasage, though 
critical responses tend to fal into two camps: some critics argue that Phoebus realy does 
think that the crow is lying; others argue that he wilfully disagres with the crow and 
70 
forces himself to believe his own rhetoric.
59
 This critical debate points out how 
Phoebus?s reaction, or rather the motivation for Phoebus?s reaction, is necesarily mired 
in a subjectivity that has no clear universal predicate. Thus, in ontological and linguistic 
terms, Phoebus?s spoken defense of his wife ofers a metatextual moment in which the 
poem enacts for the reader the very nominalism that it develops within its own narative. 
Put another way, Phoebus?s words ? his oddly unjustifiable asertion that his wife is not, 
in fact, an adulteres ? are al we as readers have to go on.
60
 
By his own report, then, Phoebus finaly does believe in both his wife?s fidelity 
and the crow?s mendacity; he knows his ?deere wyf? to be ?sad,? ?trewe,? and ?gilteles? 
(IX 274-275); he knows the crow to be a scorpion-tongued ?traitour? (IX 271). Peter 
Herman writes that Phoebus denies the crow?s words ?in order to deny the truth and 
make reality subject to his wil.?
61
 I suggest that Phoebus not only atempts to make 
material reality subject to his wil, he creates a coexisting linguistic reality by the sheer 
force of his utterances. In other words, Phoebus?s speech creates Phoebus?s world. Here, 
as with the crow?s initial report of Phoebus?s cuckolding, speech stems from mental signs 
that have no connection to an overarching universal, a paradigm that mirors the 
linguistic epistemology of Ockham?s nominalism. Indeed, the only predicate for mental 
                                                
59
 For examples of the former, se Richard Trask, ?The Manciple?s Problem,? Studies in Short Fiction 14 
(197): 14; L. A. Westervelt, ?The Medieval Notion of Janglery and Chaucer?s Manciple?s Tale,? 
Southern Review 14 (1981): 11; Jamie Fumo, ?Thinking Upon the Crow,? Chaucer Review 38 (204), 
361. The later view is most eloquently expresed by Peter Herman in ?Treason in the Manciple?s Tale,? 
Chaucer Review 25 (191): 324-5. 
60
 Brian Striar writes, ?What finaly emerges from al this dificulty and confusion is not truth or the 
location of truth but power and the location of power: the power to exploit spech and poetry to fashion 
one?s own truth or truths, as the crow does with Phoebus, as Phoebus does with the crow, as the Manciple?s 
mother does with her son, as the Manciple does with his mother, the Cok, and the audience of pilgrims, 
and as Chaucer, through the Manciple, does with us? (197). Se ?The ?Manciple?s Tale? and Chaucer?s 
Apoline Poetics,? Criticism 3 (191): 197. 
61
 Herman, ?Treason,? 324. 
71 
signs themselves is a host of other, les absolute signifieds including (as we also saw in 
the crow?s initial report of Phoebus?s cuckolding), speech itself. Without a stable 
universal to anchor the ?afections in [his] soul,? Phoebus can generate a reality with his 
own spoken utterances in which, if only for himself, his wife is chaste, is true, is guiltles. 
The objection might be raised that the reality Phoebus creates is invalid, that the 
god?s asertions of his wife?s fidelity are litle more than the disingenuous speech of a 
murderer trying to recuperate his wife?s lapsed virtue and mend his shatered reputation. 
Such is the contention of Briton Harwood, who claims that the tale told by the Manciple 
reveals his disdain for ?those who can be distracted from empirical reality by language, 
which creates a bogus reality of its own.?
62
 Although it may be true that Phoebus?s 
reality is outwardly constructed of speech and that the reader, like the crow, ses a 
broader ?empirical reality,? such an empirical reality is itself constructed by the 
Manciple?s own authority as a speaker in Chaucer?s pilgrimage. In the literary world of 
the Canterbury Tales, a world in which nine and twenty ?sondry folk? (I 25) tel stories 
to one another on horseback, the reality to which readers have aces is always mediated 
by the fictional speech of the pilgrims. In this respect the ?bogus reality? created by 
Phoebus?s speech may comment not upon the potential of speech simply to deceive but 
rather upon the power of poetic language to create worlds within the poetic text. The 
eficacy of Phoebus?s speech stands as an indication that Chaucer ? a poet whose great 
unfinished work ventriloquizes the spoken voices of 24 pilgrims ? was acutely aware of 
the potential for speech to create realities, to signify and to be signified, to engender the 
                                                
62
 Briton Harwod, ?Language and the Real: Chaucer?s Manciple,? Chaucer Review 6 (1972): 268. 
72 
kinds of mental signs ? ?thought objects? ? that nominalists argued were falsely 
perceived to be ?universals.? 
In most of the Canterbury Tales, the reader and Chaucer are complicit in their 
understanding of this potential; indeed, Chaucer alows the reader to share in his authorial 
omniscience repeatedly through his work. Like Chaucer, we know that a second flood is 
not coming to sweep John away in the Miler?s Tale even if the deceived carpenter does 
not; like Chaucer we know that Aurelius has not removed the ?grisly rokkes blake? that 
obses Dorigen (V 859), that May has not engaged in a ?strugle with a man upon a tre? 
to restore January?s sight (IV 2374), that the deceived priest of the Canon?s Yeoman?s 
Tale wil never posses the formula for multiplying base metals into gold. What 
separates the Manciple?s Tale from the other tales of the Canterbury pilgrimage ? what 
separates Phoebus?s ?bogus reality? from John?s and Dorigen?s and January?s and the 
priest?s ? is that Phoebus?s speech acts expose for the reader the very engine that drives 
Chaucer?s own poetic project. We se in Pheoebus?s speech the creation of the world by 
the utterance of the word. 
Never is this more clear than when Phoebus turns to his crow and says, ?I wol 
thee quite anon thy false tale? (IX 293). Though early in the tale Phoebus was presented 
alternately as a courtly fop and a deceived husband, at this moment he makes good on his 
threat with startling and unsparing eficacy. He becomes not the cuckold but the quiter 
of tales, not the courtly fop but the god of poets and poetry. Phoebus uses his speech not 
to create an individual linguistic reality but to change the very nature of his world. 
Cuckold, bon vivant, and author ? Phoebus speaks, and by speaking renders his talking 
crow mute, his white crow black: 
73 
Thou songe whilom lyk a nyghtyngale; 
Now shaltow, false theef, thy song forgon, 
And ek thy white fetheres everichon, 
Ne nevere in al thy life ne shaltou speke. 
Thus shal men on a traytour been awreke; 
Thou and thyn ofspryng evere shul be blake, 
Ne nevere sweete noyse shul ye make, 
But evere crie agayn tempest and rayn, 
In tokenynge that thurgh thee my wyf is slayn. (IX 294-302) 
There is a fundamental distinction between the speech that Phoebus unleashes here to 
punish the crow and the utterances he has used earlier to recuperate his wife. In the 
later, Phoebus?s speech creates an individual reality distinct from the semingly 
objective, truthful reality of the reader and the crow. In the former, Phoebus?s spoken 
words transform the crow to fit their own image; they create a reality that exists not only 
for Phoebus but for the crow and his offspring, for the reader, and even for the world 
outside the text, where black crows fly about cawing discordantly. Phoebus says that the 
crow and al his offspring wil be black, and the crow and al his ofspring are black; 
Phoebus says that the crow wil lose his beautiful voice, and the crow does lose his 
beautiful voice; Phoebus tels the crow that his cry wil stand as a harbinger of tempest 
and storm, and so it does.
63
 By turning the crow black and destroying its ability to speak, 
                                                
63
 It is important to note here that in adition to his curse, Phoebus does seize the crow and pul out his 
white feathers, an action manifestly physical and non-linguistic (IX 303-304). Nonetheles, the change of 
the color of the feathers from white to black, the destruction of the crow?s voice, and the ongoing curse on 
al the crow?s ofspring are acomplished through Phoebus?s spech alone. In short, Phoebus does 
physicaly alter the crow ith his body, but the emphasis of the pasage is stil on his words and their 
efect. 
74 
Phoebus reverses the causal relationship between the spoken sign and the mental sign; 
Phoebus forces the ?dede? ? the crow becoming black ? to acord with his words rather 
than fiting his words to the dede (IX 208). In other words, Phoebus puts the lie to what 
scholastic realists would cal the imutable universal crow because he shows that 
?universal? to be predicated upon his own speech. Here, at last, speech functions in a 
fully performative capacity. Like Amphion, who uses his voice not to describe but to 
construct the wals of Thebes, Phoebus speaks not to describe the crow but to create it. 
Here, too, is Ockham?s nominalist ontology extrapolated to its fullest extent, an ontology 
in which the spoken sign and the mental sign exist apart from an unsen host of 
transcendent universals, in which speech holds the potential not only to represent reality 
but to create reality in its own image. 
 Phoebus?s crow-transforming utterance also underscores another important 
nominalist idea, the primacy of God?s potentia absoluta over His potentia ordinata. 
Despite the Manciple?s earth-bound presentation of Phoebus, he is first and foremost a 
god. Although I do not wish to suggest that Chaucer intends Phoebus to be a simple 
stand-in for the Christian God, Phoebus?s creation and subsequent transformation of a 
speaking crow are, if nothing else, demonstrative of a God-like power. Moreover, that 
power, the Manciple sems to indicate, is absolute, even to the point that Phoebus can 
alter the crow?s natural state from white to black. Realist thinkers like Aquinas and John 
Duns Scotus rejected the potential for God to contravene His own laws, to go against the 
universal constructs of His creation. Duns Scotus writes in his Ordinatio that ?God can 
do whatever does not involve a contradiction,? maintaining that God can not flout His 
established universal laws and that ?absolute power does not absolutely exced .. ordered 
75 
power, since it would be ordered acording to another law.?
64
 Ockham, however, saw no 
problems in God?s apparent self contradictions. The potentia absoluta of God 
superseded al such paradoxes; His wil was al, and it was boundles: 
Just as God creates every creature merely from His volition, so He can do 
with creatures whatever pleases Him erely from his volition. Hence, if 
someone should love God and perform al the works approved by God, 
stil God could annihilate him without any offense. Likewise, after such 
works God could give the creature ? not eternal life ? but eternal 
punishment without offense. The explanation is that God is debtor to no 
one.
65
 
This is the very potentia that the Manciple?s story of Phoebus and the crow enacts: just as 
easily as Phoebus creates the crow by his own wil, so too does he destroy the crow and 
subject him to eternal punishment, slinging him ?out at dore .. unto the devel? (IX 306-
07). As in the nominalist interpretation of the Christian God, Phoebus becomes ?the final 
source and guarantor of truth, just as He is the final source and guarantor of laws 
governing physical bodies.?
66
 His power, as the crow painfully learns, is bounded not by 
a set of ordained and transcendent universals but by the limitles capacity of his own 
absolute wil. 
 Phoebus?s punitive series of overtly performative speech acts ? evidence both of 
the tale?s commitment to a nominalist perspective on speech and of Phoebus?s own 
potentia absoluta ? finaly propels the Manciple into his lengthy harangue on the virtues 
                                                
64
 From John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, quoted in Adams, Wiliam Ockham, 193, 92. 
65
 Wiliam of Ockham, In Libros Sententiarum, quoted in David W. Clark, ?Wiliam of Ockham on Right 
Reason,? Speculum 48 (1973): 23. 
66
 Wats and Utz, ?Nominalist Perspectives on Chaucer Poetry,? 148. 
76 
of silence. Over the course of 44 lines, the Manciple obsesively repeats maxims that his 
mother taught him, each an admonishment to ?restreyne and kepe wel thy tonge? (IX 
333), each a smal contribution to the Manciple?s absurdly garulous speech against 
speech. The paradox created by the Manciple?s prolixity is dificult to reconcile, and 
critics have responded with a variety of interpretations. Perhaps this compulsive and 
aggresive repetition demonstrates the Manciple?s growing anxiety that, as Hary Baily 
implies, the Cook wil reveal how the Manciple has ?sete .. aler cappe? (I 586) of the 
lawyers in his house; perhaps it even speaks to an unsen knot of psychological isues 
that the Manciple has with his mother.
67
 I contend, however, that in light of Phoebus?s 
final, transformative speech act, the Manciple?s warning demonstrates a nominalistic 
understanding of the terible potential of the ?rakel tonge.? In repeatedly admonishing 
his felow pilgrims to ?kepe wel thy tongue and thenk upon the crowe? (IX 362), the 
Manciple not only asks them to consider the consequences of the crow?s speech but of 
Phoebus?s speech as wel. For while it is the crow?s ?jangling? that angers Phoebus and 
brings about the crow?s punishment, it is Phoebus?s own speech act that brings the crow 
to his woeful (and current) state, a speech act that both threatens vengeance and enacts it 
in the same breath. In other words, in the Manciple?s nominalist ontology the spoken 
word is dangerous not only because it can bring to light an undesirable truth; it is 
dangerous because it can create truth in its own right. And, as the voiceles, coal-black 
crow demonstrates, the truth created by the word is not always a desirable one. 
                                                
67
 Se Earle Birney, ?Chaucer?s ?Gentil? Manciple and his ?Gentil? Tale,? Neuphilologische Miteilungen 
61 (1960): 257-267; Arnold Davidson, ?The Logic of Confusion in Chaucer?s Manciple?s Tale,? Annuale 
Mediaevale 19 (1979): 5-12. Richard Trask ses the Manciple as a somewhat gentler, medieval Norman 
Bates, ascribing the Manciple?s repetition to a matrix of submerged ?mother isues.? Se Trask, ?The 
Manciple?s Problem.? 
77 
 The Manciple?s final speech fully bears out this asertion; indeed, most of the 
aphorisms that the Manciple cribs from his mother discuss not what speech is but what 
speech does. The speech act ? metonymicaly described as the tongue ? is an active agent 
within the Manciple?s nominalist ontology, something that ?forkutteth and forkerveth? 
(IX 340), something that causes ?muchel harm? (IX 337) and prevents ?muchel reste? 
(IX 350), something that ?serveth? and ?gooth? and ?kutteth frendshipe al a-two? (IX 
339, 355, 342). The tongue becomes active speech literalized, the spoken word made 
flesh. In fact, only when he describes the ?wikked tongue? as being ?worse than a fend? 
(IX 320) does the Manciple describe speech for what it is rather for than what it does. It 
should come as no surprise, then, that in the midst of his diatribe the Manciple presents us 
with an image that clearly evokes his earlier alusion to Amphion building the wals of 
Thebes. By stating that ?God of his endeles goodnese / Waled a tongue with teth and 
lippes eke? (IX 322-23), the Manciple reinforces the ability of speech to perform work in 
the absence of universals, whether that work be constructive or, as the Manciple?s crow 
so aptly demonstrates, destructive. 
 
Nominalism and Geoffrey Chaucer: ?The Righte Way to Rome? 
The Canterbury Tales?s engagement with nominalism ? an engagement that 
reaches its apogee in the Manciple?s Tale ? prompts this question: ?What is Chaucer?s 
own perspective on Ockham?s nominalist philosophy?? The Manciple himself, I have 
argued, both subscribes to a nominalist philosophy and understands the dangers implicit 
in it; Chaucer expreses a frustratingly ambivalent atitude toward the Manciple, 
however, and by extension, toward his nominalist views. On the one hand, Chaucer 
78 
implies an afinity between himself and the Manciple several times in the Canterbury 
Tales, including in the General Prologue, where Chaucer juxtaposes his own narative 
persona with the Manciple on a single line: ?Ther was also a Reve, and a Milere / A 
Somnour, and a Pardoner also, / A Maunciple, and myself ? ther were namo?(I 542-44). 
Furthermore, because the Manciple?s Tale interogates so many of the isues explicitly 
raised by the Canterbury Tales as a whole ? the relationship between ?word? and ?dede,? 
the practice of ?quiting,? the balance between ?sentence? and ?solas? ? the Manciple 
emerges as a kind of poetic doppelganger for Chaucer, a figure within the fiction of the 
pilgrimage who engages with the same thematic isues the poet himself considers. 
Grudin has gone so far as to argue that the Manciple?s Tale ?explains and reinforces .. 
the poetic principles of the Canterbury Tales? and encapsulates ?the foundation upon 
which Chaucer?s poetics are built.?
68
 In that respect, the flexibility and power that the 
Manciple acords to speech would necesarily appeal to a poet who ?relies on equivocal 
language? in order to investigate the relationship between word and world.
69
   
On the other hand, Chaucer the author frequently disparages the Manciple despite 
connecting him so overtly to his own narative alter ego. The poet includes the Manciple 
(along with the Reve, the Miler, the Pardoner, the Summoner, and himself) in the 
galery of churls at the end of the General Prologue, and he draws the reader?s atention 
to the Manciple?s penchant for bilking the lawyers at his inn of court by noting that ?he 
sete hir aler cappe? (I 586). Chaucer also paints a highly unflatering portrait of the 
Manciple in the prologue to his tale, a piece of roadside drama in which the Manciple 
first insults the ale-sodden Cook to his face, then disingenuously denounces him to the 
                                                
68
 Grudin, Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse, 151.  
69
 Peck, ?Chaucer and the Nominalist Questions,? 760. 
79 
other pilgrims, then finaly ? after Hary Baily implies that the Cook might exact 
retribution by exposing the Manciple?s dishonest ?rekenynges? (IX 74) ? self-servingly 
plies him with wine until he can no longer speak. Even if we can imagine Chaucer using 
this most duplicitous pilgrim to propose a philosophical outlook he actively proposes, the 
choice of the Manciple as a philosophical mouthpiece raises as many questions about 
Chaucer?s atitude toward questions of nominalism as it resolves. 
Chaucer?s atitude toward nominalism gets no clearer when we move beyond the 
Manciple?s Tale and consider the final tale of the Canterbury pilgrimage, the treatise on 
confesion offered by the Parson. The links between the Parson?s Tale and the 
Manciple?s Tale have long been recognized; Chaucer explicitly encourages comparison 
by having both the Manciple and the Parson claim not to be ?textueel? men (IX 235, X 
57) and by placing the two tales back to back. Scholars who have read the tales in 
tandem, however, have almost universaly read them as antitypes. Mark Allen makes a 
representative argument in this vein: 
[The Manciple?s Tale] is markedly unpenitential, even antipenitential: the 
central transformation of the tale ? the change of the crow from white to 
black ? ironicaly reverses the penitential change that the Parson describes 
at the end of his tale.. As the Manciple encourages the Cook?s fal, so his 
tale encourages a similar fal for everyone who acepts his advice before 
the Parson?s exhortation to penance. We need the Parson?s speech to lead 
us to penance, and, as becomes increasingly clear, we need the penitential 
transformation that speech efects.
70
 
                                                
70
 Mark Alen, ?Penitential Sermons, The Manciple, and the End of The Canterbury Tales,? Studies in the 
Age of Chaucer 9 (1987): 78. Also Se Le Paterson, ?The ?Parson?s Tale? and the Quiting of the 
80 
Allen reasons that the Parson?s Tale, the last word of the Canterbury pilgrimage proper, 
efectively undoes the Manciple?s Tale; thus, we might understand it to show Chaucer 
repudiating the nominalist exceses of the Manciple himself. On one level, that argument 
makes sense: the Parson?s insistence upon penitential speech ? his dictum that ?Al moot 
be seyd, and no thing excused ne hyd ne forwrapped? (X.319) ? ofers a corective to the 
Manciple?s stifling cal to silence. Moreover, The Parson?s vision of speech as a blesing 
from God which brings spiritual salvation counters the Manciple?s view of speech as 
predominantly dangerous. Most important for our atempt to discern Chaucer?s relative 
ontological bent, the Parson?s Tale maintains a distinctly realist viewpoint, both 
philosophicaly and linguisticaly. Informed by patristic writers such as Augustine and 
Ambrose, it evinces supreme confidence both in the ?parfit knowynge of God? (X 1079) 
and in the ordained power of God to grant that ?knowynge,? with His grace, to the 
penitent soul. Even Hary Baily?s swipe at the Parson?s would-be Lolard sympathies in 
the epilogue to the Man of Law?s Tale ? ?O Jankin be ye there? / I smele a Lollere in the 
wynd? (I 1173-74) ? may suggest the Parson?s realist outlook. Despite his flagrant 
heterodoxy, John Wyclif was, in fact, a realist who rejected Ockham?s nominalist 
ontology.
71
 
But Chaucer does not alow the Parson?s Tale to serve as so straightforward an 
antidote to the nominalist Manciple?s Tale (an alternative that would have made it far 
easier to asert the poet?s realist bona fides). Despite their markedly diferent approaches, 
                                                                                                                                            
?Canterbury Tales,?? Traditio 34 (1978): 31-380; Chauncy Wod, ?Spech, the Principle of Contraries, 
and Chaucer?s Tales of the Manciple and the Parson,? Mediaevalia 6 (1980): 209-29; James Dean, ?The 
Ending of the Canterbury Tales, 1952-1976,? Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21 (1979): 17-3; 
Michael Kensak, ?The Silences of Pilgrimage, Manciple?s Tale, Paradiso, Anticlaudianus,? Chaucer 
Review 34 (199): 190-206. 
71
 Se Boucher, ?Nominalism,? 215. 
81 
the tales told by the Manciple and the Parson demonstrate a fundamental similarity in 
their understanding that language can do work, that speech has the potential to function 
performatively. Ultimately, both tales are about transformation and the ability of 
language to efect it, whether that transformation be triumphant, as in the Parson?s Tale, 
or tragic, as in the Manciple?s Tale. Even in the heat of his invective against speech, the 
Manciple pauses to exempt speech in the service of God, noting ?thy tonge sholdestow 
restreyne / At ale tymes, but whan thou doost thy peyne / To speke of God, in honor and 
preyere? (IX 329-331). In much the same way, the Parson, though clearly an advocate of 
transformative sacramental speech, warns the pilgrims against ?janglynge, that may not 
been withoute synne? (X 649) and against ?idle words, that is withouten profit of hym 
that speketh tho wordes? (X 647); this is, telingly, the same ?janglyng? (IX 350) against 
which the Manciple intones in his final speech. The diference between the Parson and 
the Manciple, then, is a diference not in kind but in emphasis. Each recognizes that 
speech has the ability to do work, but while the Manciple most frequently streses the 
destructive potential of speech over the constructive, the Parson streses the potential for 
salvation over the equaly present potential for damnation. Far from being antitypes then, 
the tales told by the Manciple and the Parson are, in fact, mirors of one another ? one 
dark, one bright, both demonstrative of the power of speech and the necesity of silence. 
The distinctions that many critics draw between the two tales become, in this regard, 
untenable. Despite the rival ontological and linguistic systems that each tale sems 
initialy to represent ? the Manciple?s Ockhamist nominalism and the Parson?s scholastic 
realism ? the two tales are ultimately revealed to be two species of the same genus. 
82 
Those same ontological and linguistic cross currents complicate even Chaucer?s 
?Retraction,? a work whose rubric ? ?Heere taketh the makere of this book his leve? 
(rubric before X 1081) ? promises some respite from the incesant layering of narators 
and sub-narators that vexes interpretation of the Canterbury Tales. We might at first be 
tempted to ascribe a realist outlook to the ?Retraction.? Indeed, Chaucer?s asertion, ?al 
that is writen is writen for oure doctrine? (X 1083) strongly suggests the subordination of 
conventional linguistic expresion to transcendent universal truth upon which the realists 
insisted. From the works that Chaucer chooses not to retract, most pertinently his 
translation of Boethius?s Consolation of Philosophy, we might additionaly construe that 
he maintains a realist viewpoint. But in many respects, the very act of retracting itself is 
at odds with realist understandings of the signifying function of language: it presupposes 
that Chaucer can use words to alter his canon, that he can ?revoke? (from the Latin re 
vocare, meaning ?cal back?) works already in existence. More cynicaly, we might read 
Chaucer?s list of retracted works as paradoxicaly speaking those works into existence, 
serving as a retrograde table of contents and reinforcing rather than diminishing their 
existence. For the modern reader, the case of Chaucer?s lost ?book of the Leoun? enacts 
such nominalistic performativity on an extra-textual level: the reference in the 
?Retraction? is al the evidence we have of that work; its reality for us is created solely by 
the linguistic signifiers used to expres it. In other words, by ?revoking? the Book of the 
Lion for himself, Chaucer efectively ?re-vokes? it for his readers as wel. 
In addition to these internal contradictions, we cannot with confidence extract the 
?Retraction? from the Canterbury frame itself. The ?makere of this book? specified by 
the rubric may (as is usualy supposed) refer to Chaucer, the historical author of the 
83 
Canterbury Tales; it may, however, just as easily refer to the pilgrim / reporter that serves 
as Chaucer?s narative alter ego.
72
 In other words, Chaucer does not unequivocaly 
relinquish the narative valences of the Canterbury Tales in his retraction. Therefore, we 
should not be surprised that Chaucer sems to follow the advice of the Parson and the 
Manciple in equal measure in the ?Retraction,? simultaneously offering the quasi-
penitent language of the ?Retraction? itself and retroactively withholding the dangerous 
language of ?many a song and many a lecherous lay? (X 1087). 
Our inability to extrapolate Chaucer?s philosophical viewpoint from the Parson?s 
Tale or the ?Retraction? makes an a fortiori argument for our inability to do so from any 
other tale or from the Canterbury collection as a whole; the intricate authorial and 
narative layering in the work is too complex to give us a clear window into Chaucer?s 
own point of view. This observation is frequently made, of course, but it is also precisely 
the point of the Canterbury Tales: the nominalist language of the Manciple?s Tale 
suggests that Chaucer is acutely aware of the nominalist underpinnings of his 
performative tale-teling project. If we move away from the highly self-conscious frame 
of the Canterbury Tales and consider Chaucer?s lyric poetry, however, we can piece 
together a diferent philosophical outlook, one more consistently realist than Chaucer?s 
final, unfinished work might suggest.  
I do not mean to suggest that we should read Chaucer?s lyrics as unvarnished 
authorial statements; these lyrics were writen within a specific courtly seting and must 
be sen in the wider context of Ricardian structures of power and patronage. 
Nonetheles, the courtly lyrics can be said to represent Chaucer?s public voice and are, 
                                                
72
 Se Olive Sayce, ?Chaucer?s ?Retractions?: The Conclusion of the Canterbury Tales and Its Place in 
Literary Tradition,? Medium Aevum 40 (1971): 230-48. 
84 
therefore, significant to our understanding of the poet?s views on nominalism. With its 
biblical refrain ?And trouthe the shal delivere, it is no drede? (7), the short poem ?Truth? 
strongly evinces the epistemology of scholastic realism: 
That thee is sent, receyve in buxumnese; 
The wrastling for this world axeth a fal. 
Her is non hoom, her nis but wildernese: 
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal!  
Know thy contre, look up, thank God of al; 
Hold the heye wey and lat thy gost thee lede, 
And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede. (15-21) 
We may initialy want to read this pasage, and especialy its first thre lines, as litle 
more than the sage (if conventional) advice ofered the courtier by the poet: ?acept your 
good fortune humbly, for it wil not folow you to your celestial home when this life is 
through.? Yet, further consideration of the poem?s language ? particularly the phrases 
?receyve in buxumnese? and ?thank God of al? ? reveal a deeply hierarchical paradigm, 
one in which the courtier obediently receives that which is given to him by god. Such a 
paradigm recals the realist epistemology of revelation that Augustine develops in De 
Magistro, in which humans receive, also in ?buxumnese,? the ilumination granted by 
God. Augustine writes, ?Our real Teacher is he who is so listened to .. namely Christ, 
that is, the unchangeable power and eternal wisdom of God. To this wisdom every 
rational soul gives heed, but to each is given only so much as he is able to receive.?
73
 It is 
logical, then, that after the admonition ?Know thy contre? ? a phrase which can mean 
                                                
73
 Augustine, ?De Magistro,? 95. 
85 
both ?know your terestrial country? and ?know that heaven is your true home? ? 
Chaucer asks the addrese to look up and thank God. It is God, from whom that 
knowledge comes, God who wil grant the universal truth that ?thee shal delievere.?
74
  
Smal wonder that this poem is situated in one manuscript next to the General Prologue?s 
portrait of the Parson, a pilgrim whose faith in an orderly, hierarchical cosmos leads him 
to lament that ?in mannes synne is every manere of ordre or ordinaunce turned up-so-
doun? (X 259).
75
 
 Chaucer?s other so-caled ?Boethian Lyrics? imply a similar investment in the 
linguistic and ontological precepts of scholastic realism.
76
 In ?Gentilese,? Chaucer 
particularly aserts the objective universality of such concepts as ?vertu? (4), ?vice? (11) 
and ?vertuous noblese? (17), while in ?Fortune? he echoes the Parson?s lament about 
?ordre or ordinaunce turned up-so-doun? by bewailing ?this wretched worldes 
transmutacioun .. withouten ordre or wys discrecioun?(1-3). Most teling of al, 
however, is ?Lak of Stedfastnese,? which maries the other lyrics? concerns with 
hierarchy and disorder to questions of speech and language: 
Somtyme the world was so stedfast and stable 
That mannes word was obligacioun, 
And now it is so fals and deceivable 
That word and deed, as in conclusioun, 
Ben nothing lyk, for turned up-so-doun 
                                                
74
 The MED defines ?contre? both as ?any geographic area or physiographic province? (n., 1) and as ?the 
realm (of the air, the stars, heaven)? (n., 5). Se also Note 19 for ?Truth,? in The Riverside Chaucer, 1085. 
75
 Se Leila Z. Gros?s brief discusion of ?Truth,? in ?The Short Poems? (introduction), The Riverside 
Chaucer, 635. 
76
 For the grouping of ?Truth,? ?Fortune,? ?Gentilese,? and ?Lak of Stedfastnese? as ?Boethian Lyrics? 
se Gros, ?The Short Poems,? in The Riverside Chaucer, 634-35 (introduction to ?The Former Age?). 
86 
Is al this world for mede and wilfulnese, 
That al is lost for lak of stedfastnese. (1-7) 
Although here Chaucer repeats his plaint that the once stable world has turned ?up-so-
doun,? he gives that inversion a specific shape in the dislocation of word from deed, of 
sign from signified. As we have already sen in the Manciple?s Tale, such a dislocation 
is implicit within Ockham?s nominalist ontology: without universals upon which to 
predicate the mental sign, there can be no guarante that even the most scrupulous and 
acurate verbal utterance correlates with a stable, transcendent reality. Subjective reality 
becomes the only reality. In such a world, ?Vertu hath .. no dominacioun? (16) because 
?vertu? is merely a contingent signifier rather than an overarching universal sign. 
Similarly, ?resoun is holden fable? because neither ?resoun? nor ?fable? is predicated 
upon a larger ?trouthe? (15). As Liam Purdon writes, ?the obvious result of the mutable 
and debased state of language and thought, acording to Chaucer, is that vice reigns, 
while virtue and pity and mercy .. are either relegated to a state of insignificance or 
exiled.?
77
   
 Although ?Lak of Stedfastnese? clearly deplores the encroachment of 
nominalism on an increasingly disordered cosmos, the corrective it supplies for an ?up-
so-doun? nominalist world is, in fact, startlingly reminiscent of Ockham?s own 
philosophy: 
O prince, desyre to be honourable, 
Cherish thy folk and hat extorcioun. 
Suffre nothing that may be reprevable 
                                                
77
 Liam O. Purdon, ?Chaucer?s Lak of Stedfastnese: a Revalorization of the Word,? in Sign, Sentence, 
Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature, ed. Julian Waserman and Lois Roney 
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Pres, 1989), 147. 
87 
To thyn estat don in thy regioun. 
Shew forth thy sword of castigacioun, 
Dred God, do law, love trouthe and worthinese, 
And wed thy folk agein to stedfastnese. 
Directed to King Richard I, this envoy brings an overt political dimension to the lyric, 
making terestrial the ?up-so-doun? cosmic hierarchy described by the first thre stanzas 
and investing the king rather than God with the power to right it. In urging the king to 
?shew forth [the] sword of castigacioun,? Chaucer esentialy argues for the royal 
equivalent of God?s potentia absoluta: Richard is to ?suffre nothing? that works against 
his regal authority, and he should not spare punishment in his atempts to wed his 
subjects back to the stable earthly hierarchy. Despite Chaucer?s insistence that Richard 
?Dred God, do law [and] love trouthe and worthinese,? the efect of advice contained in 
the envoy is, as Paul Strohm flatly states, ?to strengthen the king?s hand; to urge him to 
stifen up and be a king.?
78
 Where Ockham turned to the potentia absoluta of God to 
remedy the cosmic disorder threatened by the abandonment of stable universals, Chaucer 
turns to the potentia absoluta of the king to remedy the earthly disorder that prevailed at 
the close of the fourtenth century. 
 The envoy to King Richard that concludes ?Lak of Steadfastnese? is particularly 
suggestive for our reading of the Manciple?s Tale. As a number of critics have pointed 
out, the bow-wielding Phoebus bears more than a pasing resemblance to Richard I, a 
monarch whose increasingly tyrannical reign in the late 1390s was emblemized by his 
retinue of Cheshire archers and whose aspirations to semi-divine status are revealed in 
                                                
78
 Strohm, England?s Empty Throne, 174. 
88 
such visual works as the Westminster Abbey Coronation Portrait and the extraordinary 
Wilton Diptych.
79
 Equaly important, particularly in light of the power Chaucer acords 
to Phoebus?s speech, is the power that Richard himself semed to invest in the spoken 
word; among the articles of deposition drafted against the king in 1399 was the 
acusation that Richard proclaimed ?the laws were in his own mouth .. and that he alone 
could change or establish the laws of his realm.?
80
 Recent scholarship has detailed a 
changing ?vocabulary of kingship? toward the end of Richard?s reign, in which the king 
demanded new and elaborate forms of royal addres in order to encourage ?a lofty, 
almost God-like, image of himself.. as a distant, majestic and al-powerful figure.?
81
  
Richard also manipulated the legal and parliamentary procedings surrounding the 
?Revenge Parliament? of 1397, including the damning spoken confesion made by the 
Duke of Gloucester just before his death. In these actions, it is possible to se Richard 
atempting ? like Chaucer?s Phoebus ? to alter the world by altering the language used to 
describe it.
82
 And while it is surely absurd to imagine Richard simply taking Chaucer?s 
envoy to heart and asuming the mantle of royal potentia absoluta on its behest, it is not 
absurd to imagine Chaucer understanding Richard?s tyranny as the only possible response 
to what he might se as England?s descent into a nominalist dystopia. Nor is it absurd (or 
even dificult) to imagine Chaucer composing his Manciple?s Tale mindful of both that 
descent and the increasing royal tyranny he may have asociated with it. 
                                                
79
 For a discusion of Phoebus and the Cheshire archers, se Walace, Chaucerian Polity, 256-259. A god 
survey of scholarship on the Wilton Diptych, a work in which a kneling Richard is depicted surounded by 
saints and greted by The Virgin, Christ, and a heavenly host, can be found in Nigel Saul, Richard I (New 
Haven, CT: Yale University Pres, 197), 304-08. 
80
 Quoted in Walace, Chaucerian Polity, 297. Se also Saul, Richard I, 248-250. 
81
 Saul, ?Richard I and the Vocabulary of Kingship,? 876. 
82
 Giancarlo, ?Murder, Lies, and Storyteling,? 76-112. 
89 
In the absence of the narative and meta-narative complexities of the Canterbury 
Tales, the Boethian lyrics demonstrate that despite the afinities between Chaucer and the 
Manciple, the world described in the Manciple?s Tale ? in which realist ontological and 
linguistic hierarchies are upended and the spoken word can function performatively 
without constraint or universal predicate ? is not only a world that Chaucer decries and 
fears; it is a world that he ses manifest in the political and social landscape around him. 
Thus if Chaucer is a nominalist, as Peck and others have suggested, he is only the most 
reluctant of nominalists, simultaneously aware and fearful of the possibilities arising from 
an ?up-so-doun? philosophy. P. B. Taylor more probably aserts that Chaucer ?aspires 
toward a linguistic realism in which intent informs deeds through the ministry of words? 
but that ? this aspiration is an ideal sullied by the practice of the real world.?
83
 Inasmuch 
as Chaucer believes that speech and the mental signs that precede it are ? and should be ? 
subordinated to universal truths, he is a realist. And yet, as a poet and a creator of fiction, 
Chaucer is also acutely aware of, and invested in, the potentia that nominalists like 
Ockham ascribed to spoken and writen signs. The very world that Chaucer inhabited, 
which frequently throbbed with the Sturm und Drang of social discord, must have invited 
comparison to the upended hierarchies and arbitrary expresions of power manifest in 
nominalism. 
Despite al of this ? or perhaps because of it ? Chaucer offers an optimistic 
expresion of scholastic realism in one of his most unlikely literary endeavors. 
Ostensibly writen for his ten-year-old son ?Lowys,? who had shown ?by certeyne 
evydences [an] abilite to lerne sciences touching nombres? (Astrolabe 1-3), Chaucer?s 
                                                
83
 Taylor, ?Chaucer?s Cosyn to the Dede,? 325. 
90 
Treatise on the Astrolabe purports to provide in English (apparently Lowys?s knowledge 
of Latin was ?yit but smal?) the ?reules and .. trewe conclusions? (26-29) of the 
astronomical instrument. It also provides in its introduction a remarkable articulation of 
the linguistic principles of scholastic realism: 
This tretis, divided in 5 parties, wol I shewe the under full light reules and 
naked wordes in English, for Latyn canst thou yit but smal, my litel sone. 
But natheles suffise to the these trewe conclusions in English as wel as 
sufficith to these noble clerkes Grekes these same conclusions in Grek; 
and to Arabiens in Arabik, and to Jewes in Ebrew, and to Latyn folk in 
Latyn; whiche Latyn folk had hem first out of othere dyverse langages, 
and writen hem in her owne tunge, that is to seyn, in Latyn. And God 
woot that in ale these langages and in many moo han these conclusions 
ben suffisantly lerned and taught, and yit by diverse reules; right as 
diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome .. And Lowys, 
yf so be that I shewe the in my lighte English as trewe conclusions 
touching this mater, and not oonly as trewe but as many and as subtile 
conclusiouns, as ben shewid in Latyn in eny commune tretys of the 
Astrelabie, konne me the more thank. (25-55) 
Chaucer?s argument that English ?sufficith? for ?Lyte Lowys? just as Grek suffices for 
Greks and Latin suffices for ?Latyn folk? is most imediately relevant as ?part of 
Chaucer?s characteristic interest in the translator?s role.?
84
 However, that same argument 
also implies ? indeed is predicated upon ? the universality of what Chaucer refers to as 
                                                
84
 Wogan-Brown, The Idea of the Vernacular, 9. 
91 
?trewe conclusions,? concepts that exist outside the conventional signifiers of spoken 
language and from which those signifiers derive their truth value. Moreover, such ?trewe 
conclusions? are the same not only in diferent languages (?Arabik,? ?Ebrew,? ?Grek?) 
but for diferent peoples (?Arabiens,? ?Jewes,? ?Grekes?); they cannot, therefore, exist 
?only as.. thought object[s] in the mind? but must necesarily be part of a set of 
overarching truths, of universal constants upon which first mental signs and then spoken 
signs are predicated.
85
 Thus, Chaucer?s dictum, ?diverse pathes leden diverse folk the 
righte way to Rome? (39-40) encapsulates his realist beliefs: the diversity of speech and 
writing drawn from a diversity of individuals is nonetheles predicated upon a single 
?righte way,? a universal that always comes from and leads to the same place.
86
 It is 
fiting, then, that Chaucer echoes one of the more realist sentiments of the ?Retraction? 
when, in the Treatise on the Astrolabe, he describes translating the astrological work ?in 
myn English oonly for thy doctrine? (63-4). 
But even beyond Chaucer?s introductory ruminations on translation, language, 
and universals, The Treatise on the Astrolabe articulates a realist ontology. Indeed, the 
very choice of the astrolabe as a textual subject evokes the realist ontological hierarchy, 
expresed here as part of the ?pervasive and ubiquitous medieval principle of the celestial 
dominance over terestrial mater.?
87
 The very purpose of medieval astronomy (and of 
the more suspect interpretive art of astrology) was to glean ?trewe conclusions? from the 
                                                
85
 From Ordinatio, in Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 41. 
86
 Seth Lerer also coments on this pasage in ?Chaucer?s Sons,? University of Toronto Quarterly 73 
(204): 906-15.  The phrase ?diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome? is a clear echo of 
the proem to bok I of the highly Boethian Troilus and Criseyde: ?For every wight which that to Rome 
went / Halt nat o path, or alwey o manere? (Troilus 2.36-37). 
87
 Edward Grant, ?Medieval and Renaisance Scholastic Conceptions,? quoted in Jenifer Arch, ?A Case 
Against Chaucer?s Authorship of the Equatorie of the Planets,? Chaucer Review 40 (205): 64-5. 
92 
observable phenomena of the heavens, to understand the universal truths that the motions 
of the stars and planets signified. When Chaucer introduces the Astrolabe to his son, he 
specifies its ability to iluminate truths beyond those known by human beings: ?truste wel 
that ale the conclusions that han be founde in so noble an instrument as is an Astrelabie 
ben unknowe parfitly to eny mortal man in this regioun, as I suppose? (15-19). John 
Gower?s confesor, Genius, makes a similar case for the transcendent truth of the heavens 
when he instructs Amans on the arts of astronomy in Confesio Amantis: 
   "Benethe upon this erthe hiere 
Of ale thinges the matiere, 
As telen ous thei that ben lerned, 
Of thing above it stant governed, 
That is to sein of the planetes.?
88
 
Although the practices and interpretation of astronomy do not always acord with the 
teachings of the Church (a point also made by Gower in the Confesio), the science 
nonetheles depends upon the core beliefs of realist thought. The science itself is 
?hierarchicaly ordered to the supreme purpose of knowing God,? an Aristotelian atempt 
to know the universal through sense experience.
89
 This, finaly, is the ontology that 
Chaucer wants to pas onto his son Lowys; an ontology that may inform Chaucer?s own 
thinking about the world he inhabits. 
                                                
88
 John Gower, Confesio Amantis, ed Rusel Peck, 3 vols. (Kalamazo, MI: Medieval Institute 
Publications, 200, 203, 204), 3:279 (7.63-37). The Latin inscription that introduces the chapter 
sugests a comensurately realist ontology: Lege planetarum agis inferiora reguntur, / Ista set interdum 
regula falit opus. / Vir mediante deo sapiens dominabitur astris, / Fata nec imerito quid nouitatis agunt. 
[Things lower down are ruled by the law of the planets, and sometimes that governance foils endeavor. 
With God's intervention the wise man wil rule the stars, and the fates wil not cause anything sudenly 
unfavorable.] (p. 3:279 [7.iv]) 
89
 Evans, Philosophy and Theology, 9. 
93 
 Of course the world we desire to give our sons and daughters and the world that 
we fear they wil inherit are two diferent things. When we think about the tumult that 
Chaucer witnesed in his sixty years ? from the plague outbreak of his childhood, to his 
time in the Hundred Years war, to the mob pasing by his Aldgate house in 1381, to his 
service in the Good Parliament, to the deposition and murder of King Richard during the 
final months of his life ? we must also recognize that the orderly universe the poet 
describes to his young, mathematicaly inclined son was never the universe he knew. I 
wrote at the outset of this chapter that it is impossible to be certain of Chaucer?s position 
on nominalism. Nonetheles, I have made the argument that Chaucer was a realist, albeit 
one who recognized an active tension between realism and the exigencies of an 
increasingly ?up-so-doun? world. This is the tension that he enmeshes into his Boethian 
lyrics and that simers menacingly beneath the surface of his Manciple?s Tale. In some 
respects, it may sem na?ve to suggest that this tension finds its primary expresion in 
Chaucer?s literary representations of speech. But as the Manciple?s Tale shows us, the 
power that the poet acords to the spoken word is often monumental. Perhaps what we 
finaly witnes in Chaucer?s poetry is a cry against the discord and entropy of the 
fourtenth century, a poetic cal for the restoration of order amidst social and cultural 
chaos. And perhaps the Manciple?s Tale itself ? in its depiction of a topsy-turvy, 
unhinged world ? is nothing les than a speculum mundi, a miror reflecting both 
Chaucer?s own disjointed world and the poet?s pleas for it to be set right again. 
 
94 
CHAPTER 2 
 
?And chaungit cheuely hor nomes?: 
Eucharist, Baptism, and Sacramental Utterance in Saint Erkenwald 
 
 It is with good reason that critics have focused so persistently on the sacrament of 
baptism in their readings of Saint Erkenwald: even in the frequently outlandish universe 
of medieval aliterative verse, the poem?s climactic spectacle of a miraculously preserved 
and reanimated corpse crumbling to dust at the moment of its christening is a remarkable 
one. Generaly recognized to be an English recasting of the legend of Saint Gregory and 
the Emperor Trajan, Saint Erkenwald focuses on the discovery, during the construction of 
Saint Paul?s Cathedral, of a magnificent sarcophagus containing the inexplicably 
preserved corpse. Unable to read the engravings on the sarcophagus or to determine the 
identity or even the vintage of the body, London?s increasingly agitated citizens summon 
their bishop, Erkenwald, from clerical duties in Esex so that he might solve the mystery 
and quel the growing civic unrest it has created. Erkenwald addreses the corpse, 
commanding it in the name of God to reveal its secrets; and like some Celtic 
Frankenstein?s monster, it blinks its eyes and begins to tel its story. The corpse, it turns 
out, was a judge who lived 500 years before Christ. Strict, honest, and unswervingly fair, 
the judge was buried as a king for his flawles adherence to law; but as a heathen, his 
soul was ?dampnyd dulfully into !e depe lake? (302), unable to join in the great feast of 
95 
Heaven.
1
 Deeply moved by the mournful tale, Erkenwald cannot help but weep, and he 
wishes aloud that God could grant the virtuous pagan life once more, just long enough to 
be baptized. If only such a thing were possible, the bishop exclaims, he would speak 
these words: ?I folwe !e in !e Fader nome and His fre Childes, / And of !e gracious Holy 
Goste? (318-19). Despite the oddly conditional mode of his baptismal prayer (an isue to 
which I wil return), the words have their efect; as Erkenwald uters them, one of his 
tears fals on the judge?s face to complete the sacrament. The new Christian soul flies to 
heaven; the body fals to ash. Bels ring in London. Order is restored. 
 Gordon Whatley identifies two, overarching critical responses to the poem. The 
first, that the heathen judge achieves salvation by virtue of his good works and worthy 
life, is a position that closely echoes Langland?s treatment of the Trajan story in Piers 
Plowman.
2
 Implicit in such a response is the argument that ?the poet?s main concern is to 
afirm the eficacy of individual merit and good works in the achievement of salvation,? 
that the actions of the heathen judge alone are sufficient to engender the mercy of God.
3
  
                                                
1
 Al quotations from the poem are from Saint Erkenwald, ed. Cliford Peterson (Philadelphia: University 
of Pensylvania Pres, 197). References to this edition wil be cited parentheticaly in the text by line 
number. Al translations of the poem are mine unles otherwise noted. 
2
 Gordon Whatley provides an overview of critical responses to the poem?s baptism of the virtuous pagan 
in ?Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in its Legendary Context,? Speculum 61 (1986): 30-63. He also 
ofers more general background on medieval redactions of the Gregory/Trajan legend in ?The Uses of 
Hagiography: The Legend of Pope Gregory and the Emperor Trajan in the Midle Ages,? Viator 15 (1984): 
25-63. In Langland?s version of the Trajan legend, told by the figure of Trajan himself, the path to 
redemption is explicitly neither baptism nor posthumous conversion to Christianity; rather it is ethical, just, 
and moraly outstanding behavior. This is a clear deviation not only from any earlier versions of the 
Trajan story but from orthodox medieval theology itself. Se Wiliam Langland, Piers Plowman: The B 
Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (London: Athlone Pres, 1975), 45-46 (B.1.140-
157).  For a more complete analysis of the Gregory/Trajan legend in Piers Plowman and Saint Erkenwald 
se Frank Grady, ?Piers Plowman, St. Erkenwald, and the Rule of Exceptional Salvations,? Yearbok of 
Langland Studies 6 (192): 63-88. Recently, critics have atempted to place the poem?s emphasis on 
conversion in a more historical context, particularly Ruth Nis?, ??A Coroun Ful Riche?: The Rule of 
History in St. Erkenwald,? English Literary History 65 (198): 27-295; Frank Grady, ?St. Erkenwald and 
the Merciles Parliament,? Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (200): 179-211; and Chism, Alliterative 
Revivals, 41-65. 
3
 Whatley, ?Heathens and Saints,? 32. 
96 
Whatley himself offers a diferent analysis, suggesting that the poem demonstrates how 
salvation requires not only the sacrament of baptism, but also the authority of the Church 
to administer it. Since his influential esay, critics have tended to follow Whatley?s 
asertion even as they have worked to refine it. Whereas Frank Grady finds that Saint 
Erkenwald occupies a kind of middle-ground between Langland?s heterodox treatment of 
the Trajan story and a strict orthodox one, both Christine Chism and Wiliam Kamowski 
se the poem as profoundly orthodox and, more specificaly, profoundly anti-Wyclifite. 
More recently, Jennifer Sisk has argued that even as it ?overtly expreses traditional 
views,? Saint Erkenwald finaly ?occupies an idiosyncratic position that uneasily 
negotiates the distance between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in a way we might beter 
describe as both/and.?
4
 
 Few critics have examined the nature of sacramental speech in Saint Erkenwald, 
which is surprising when we consider the poem?s investment in ? even obsesion with ? 
the speech-centered sacrament of baptism.
5
 The first part of this chapter proposes to 
                                                
4
 Grady notes that although the Erkenwald poet takes a more orthodox position than Langland, the poem is 
not necesarily as conservative as Whatley maintains; Chism and Kamowski argue that the poem?s 
emphasis on the spectacle and ceremony of the Church amounts not only to a reafirmation of orthodox 
Catholic practice and eclesiastical authority but to an argument against Lolard chalenges to orthodoxy. 
Se Grady, ?Rule of Exceptional Salvations,? 6-68; Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 41-65; Wiliam 
Kamowski, ?Saint Erkenwald and the Inadvertent Baptism: An Orthodox Response to Heterodox 
Ecclesiology,? Religion and Literature 27 no.3 (195): 5-27; Jenifer Sisk, ?The Uneasy Orthodoxy of St. 
Erkenwald,? ELH 74 (207): 108-09. 
5
 Some exceptions are James P. Crowley, ?Liturgy, Sung Prayer and Quest in the Midle English Saint 
Erkenwald,? Neuphilologische Miteilungen 93 (1982): 315-23, and Wiliam A. Quin, ?A Liturgical Detail 
and an Alternative Reading of St. Erkenwald, Line 319,? Review of English Studies 35 (1984): 35-41. 
Crowley discuses the poem in the context of late medieval Catholic liturgy, particularly the singing of 
prayers by the choir, and sugests that the spoken (or sung) spiritual ?seking? by the choir suports 
Erkenwald in his eforts to baptize the heathen judge. Quin posits that the phrase ?and not one grue 
lenger? (319) underscores the necesity for precision in utering the baptismal formula, an argument to 
which this esay wil return. Also of interest is Stephen K. Wright, ?St. Erkenwald and Quem Quaeritis: A 
Reconsideration,? English Language Notes 31 no. 3 (194): 29-35. Wright sugests that Saint Erkenwald?s 
phrase ?queme questis? (l. 13), which sems to draw an anomalous comparison betwen the melodious 
chant of a cathedral choir (queme) and the baying of hunting dogs (queste), could be profitably emended to 
?queme quethes,? a phrase meaning ?beautiful words? or ?lovely spech.?  
97 
remedy that lack of critical atention by looking at baptism not simply as the means of 
salvation for the pagan judge but as a sacrament whose reliance upon the spoken word 
raises fundamental isues about the eficacy of sacramental language and about the 
priest?s role in administering it. Although this chapter gives baptism its due in the poem, 
it ultimately seks to look beyond baptism and to focus on another orthodox rite, one 
similarly invested in the transformative power of the priest?s words: the sacrament of the 
Eucharist. As a number of recent studies have demonstrated, the Eucharist atained 
imense cultural importance in fourtenth- and fiftenth-century England, even as it 
came under increasing scrutiny, most vociferously by heterodox Wyclifite Christians.
6
  
By denying the orthodox view of transubstantiation, Wyclif and his followers mounted an 
atack on the Church that, taken to its extreme, semed poised to ?destroy Christianity 
and unravel the very fabric of human community.?
7
 I argue that Saint Erkenwald, while 
never explicitly refering to the Eucharist or the doctrine of transubstantiation, 
nevertheles demonstrates its alegiance to orthodox eucharistic theology in its acount of 
the judge?s conversion. In some respects, this argument comports with earlier criticism 
showing how the orthodoxy of the poem is constructed through its explicitly baptismal 
aspects; however, I depart from that criticism in two fundamental ways. First, I argue 
that the key indicator of orthodoxy in the poem is not the judge?s baptism per se but the 
eficacy of Erkenwald?s words both in the performance of the baptism and in the 
miraculous reanimation of the heathen corpse. Second, I demonstrate that Saint 
Erkenwald focuses on the eficacy of language in order to bind the salvation of the 
                                                
6
 For example, se Aers, Sanctifying Signs, especialy chapters 1, 3 and 4; Beckwith, Christ?s Body; Rubin, 
Corpus Christi. The more overtly political ramifications of this isue are sketched out sucinctly by 
Strohm in England?s Empty Throne, 45-53. 
7
 Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 54. 
98 
heathen judge to the defining sacrament of the Eucharist, a connection that alows the 
poem to offer a far more comprehensive response to Wyclifite heresies, as wel as a 
more forceful afirmation of orthodoxy, than previous work on Saint Erkenwald has 
acknowledged.
8
 
 The second part of this chapter takes a broader view than the first: it considers 
Saint Erkenwald?s anti-Wyclifite stance in the context of the Church?s relationship with 
its non-Christian forbears. I argue that the poem develops its imediate polemic against 
Lollardy within a semantic and linguistic register that evokes a number of fundamental 
theological isues: namely, the nature of orthodox eschatology, the foundational Christian 
precepts of Old Law and New Law, and the typological model by which medieval 
Christianity defined itself against paganism and Judaism. By again focusing on the 
eficacy ? and sometimes the stubborn inertnes ? of the spoken word within these 
theological contexts, this chapter not only establishes Saint Erkenwald?s views on 
Lollardy but also uncovers the poem?s cultural anxieties over the origins of English 
Christianity and its susceptibility to heterodox and heretical threats. 
 
The Words of the Priest, the Body of Christ 
 The conditional mode of Bishop Erkenwald?s baptismal prayer remains one of 
Saint Erkenwald?s most criticaly vexing details. Moved to tears by the corpse?s story, 
                                                
8
 In late medieval England the word ?Lolard? was not necesarily used to describe a folower of John 
Wyclif. Often the word was simply a blanket term for those who deviated from any number of teachings of 
the Church; its closest synonym today would simply be ?heretic.? Nonetheles, with the specific form of 
heresy given voice by the teachings of John Wyclif, ?Lolard? ultimately did become synonymous with 
?Wyclifite?; therefore, I wil use the two words interchangeably. For an overview of the conections 
betwen Lolardy and Wyclifism, se Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 60-73. Also helpful is 
Andrew E. Larsen, ?Are Al Lolards Lolards?,? in Lolards and Their Influence in Late Medieval 
England, ed. Fiona Somerset, Jil C. Havens and Derick G. Pitard (Wodbridge, UK: Boydel Pres, 
2003), 59-72. 
99 
the bishop laments the pagan judge?s pitiable condition aloud and wishes he had the 
power to perform a baptism: 
?Our Lord lene,? quo! !at lede [Erkenwald], ?!at !ou lyfe hades, 
By Goddes leue, as longe as I my!t lache water 
And cast vpon !i faire cors and carpe !es wordes, 
?I folwe !e in !e Fader nome and His fre Childes, 
And of !e gracious Holy Goste? and not one grue lenger; 
"en !of !ou droppyd doun ded hit daungerde me lase.? 
Wyt !at worde !at he warpyd !e wete of eghen 
And teres trilyd adoun and on !e toumbe lighten, 
And one fele on his face and !e freke syked. (315-323)
9
 
Since Whatley, most critics of Saint Erkenwald have read this pasage as an afirmation 
of the unconditional necesity of orthodox baptism for salvation. However acurate, such 
an asesment does litle to acount for the fact that the baptism itself is an acident: the 
baptismal tear is shed without what we might cal baptismal intent. Even more 
remarkably, the baptismal prayer is uttered only as a demonstration of what Erkenwald 
would say if he thought it would do any good. Annemarie Thijms suggests that the 
?acidental? nature of the baptism and Erkenwald?s conditional prayer alow Saint 
Erkenwald to skirt a problem that has often troubled the Trajan legend, namely the sticky 
isue of an eclesiast asking God to change His mind and grant salvation to a damned 
                                                
9
 ??Our lord grant,? said Erkenwald, ?that you had life, by God?s leave, long enough that I might use water 
and cast it upon your fair corpse and speak these words: ?I folow the in the name of the father and his 
generous Child and of the gracious Holy Ghost,? and not one word more. Then though you droped down 
into death, it would trouble me les.? With those words his eyes became wet and tears triled down and 
alighted on the tomb, and one fel on the face of the corpse and he sighed.? 
100 
pagan.
10
 I propose that the conditional bracketing of the baptismal words ? ?I my!t 
lache water / And cast vpon !i faire cors and carpe !es wordes? ? also serves a 
metadiscursive function: it draws atention to the words of the spoken baptismal prayer as 
words, divorced from their specific sacramental context. Even so, the words are 
apparently eficacious; Erkenwald?s baptismal prayer does perform its appointed work, 
whether it is uttered conditionaly, subjunctively, or with genuine intent to baptize. In 
this respect, the poem shows the sacramental utterance itself to be important, not 
necesarily the intent with which it is uttered. When the newly christened judge fels his 
soul enter heaven, he places the responsibility for his salvation squarely on ?!e wordes 
!at !ou [Erkenwald] werpe and !e water !at !ou sheddes? (329): the words ? as wel as 
the water ? of baptism. Indeed, it is only ?Wyt !at worde? (321) that the baptismal tear is 
efective. As Peter Cramer argues in his recent study of baptism in the Middle Ages, 
?The power of language, and especialy of liturgical language, to ?make? those who speak 
it, to invigorate the natural motion of the soul, is more than a philosopher?s idea. It is one 
of the fundamental reasons why sacrament works, throughout the Middle Ages and no 
doubt beyond them too.?
11
 
 Cramer?s discussion of liturgical speech as language which ?makes? those who 
speak it is reminiscent of the work of Austin and Searle, whose identification of the 
performative utterance provides a useful framework for looking at sacramental speech. 
Almost by definition, the prescribed words of baptism fal into the category of the 
performative: utered in the proper social circumstances, the words, ?I folowe the, or eles 
                                                
10
 Anemarie Thijms, ?The Sacrament of Baptism in St. Erkenwald: The Perfect Transformation of the 
Trajan Legend,? Neophilologus 89 (205): 31-27. 
11
 Peter Cramer, Baptism and Change in the Early Midle Ages, c.200 ? c. 150 (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Pres, 193), 109. 
101 
I crystene !e, in the nome of / the fader & !e sone and the holy gost,? efect the 
fundamental change of christening the individual being baptized.
12
 Moreover, the Word 
of God itself, from which, acording to Aquinas, the baptismal prayer derives its eficacy, 
demonstrates speech at its most explicitly performative. After al, ?the sublime speech of 
God in advance of his action is,? as Augustine of Hippo notes, ?the imutable reason of 
the action itself.?
13
 
 W. A. Quinn further demonstrates Saint Erkenwald?s emphasis on the power of 
sacramental language by highlighting the poem?s emphasis on specificity in sacramental 
language. Turning to John Mirk?s wel-known fiftenth-century instructions for parish 
priests to support his asertions, Quinn argues that the ambiguous phrase ?and not one 
grue lenger? (319) following Erkenwald?s recitation of the baptismal formula should be 
understood as ?with no more words,? an afirmation of the precise, Trinitarian, baptismal 
formula endorsed by the Church.
14
 Specificaly, Quinn highlights Mirk?s insistence that 
priests recite the exact words of baptism and that they ?[do] no more?.
15
 Such concern 
for the precise form of sacramental speech in baptism is also expresed in more doctrinal 
sources. Aquinas argues that ?Baptism receives its consecration from its form?. 
Consequently the cause of baptism needs to be expresed in the baptismal form.? He 
further ties the sacramental utterance to the Word of God itself: ?The words which are 
uttered in the sacramental forms, are said not merely for the purpose of signification, but 
also for the purpose of eficiency, inasmuch as they derive eficiency from that Word, by 
                                                
12
 John Mirk?s Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. Gilis Kristenson (Lund: CWK Glerup, 1972), 74 (l. 
127-128). This pasage is also quoted in Quin, ?A Liturgical Detail,? p. 39. 
13
 Augustine, City of God, 5:36-37. 
14
 Quin, ?A Liturgical Detail,? 37. 
15
 Kristenson, Mirk?s Instructions, 74 (l. 125). 
102 
Whom al things were made.?
16
 Telingly, Aquinas is far les stringent when it comes to 
the physical procedures of baptism and even to the persons authorized to perform the 
sacrament.
17
 The work of baptism, he sems to recognize, is performed les by water 
than by a specific and powerful sacramental formula, a formula that might be diluted, 
corrupted, or even invalidated by the addition to or alteration of its language. 
 One critic has demonstrated that Saint Erkenwald?s insistence on orthodox 
baptism and its strong afirmation of the baptismal utterance show the poem to be a 
rebuttal of Lollard arguments to the contrary, noting that its treatment of the sacrament is 
?antithetical to some of the most notorious and pointed Wyclifite chalenges to the 
Church?s eficacy in salvation.?
18
 Lollards in general denied the absolute necesity of 
baptism and also of the baptismal formula itself, two significant breaks from orthodox 
theology. Some Lollards argued that children of Christians were christened in utero 
through the faith of their parents and that a formal baptism would have been redundant.
19
  
Wyclif himself writes in De Eclesia that the act of baptism does not necesarily destroy 
the taint of original sin; and in  ?Speculum de Antichristo,? he isues an atack on 
eclesiastics who focus on baptizing the mases rather than preaching to them, suggesting 
that since ?god sent [the Apostle Paul] for to preche !e gospel & not to cristene men,? 
ordinary priests should follow suit.
20
 In al of these instances, both the necesity and the 
                                                
16
 Aquinas, Suma Theologica, 4:2378, 2379 (II. q. 6 a. 5). 
17
 Aquinas enumerates a number of methods by which one can be baptized (imersion, sprinkling, 
pouring), and posits that in certain circumstances, baptism can be performed by lay people, women, and 
even Jews and pagans. Se Aquinas, Suma Theologica, 4:2373-2392 (II. q. 6 ? II. q. 67). 
18
 Kamowski, ?Inadvertent Baptism,? 1. 
19
 Se Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 291. 
20
 John Wyclif, De Eclesia, ed. Johan Loserth (London: Tr?bner & Co., 186), 467-468; John Wyclif, 
?Speculum de Antichristo,? in The English Works of John Wyclif, ed. F. D. Mathew, EETS o.s. 74 
103 
eficacy of the priest?s baptismal prayer ? in J. L. Austin?s terms, the prayer?s 
performativity ? are caled into question. If God?s grace alone is enough to christen the 
soul, the words of the baptismal prayer become, at best, an outward sign of christening 
and, at worst, an impediment to the true nature of the sacrament and a distracting 
sideshow to what Lollards considered the real work of the Church. 
 But if Saint Erkenwald is to be a poetic bulwark against the encroaching threat of 
Lollardy, it must do more than simply reinforce the need for orthodox baptism. Certainly 
an afirmation of baptism could have been understood as an anti-Wyclifite gesture. Yet 
the most sustained and coherent Wyclifite atack on the institutional Church was directed 
at the sacrament of the Eucharist, not at baptism.
21
 Because the eucharistic sacrament 
invested the clergy with so much authority, Wyclifite ?re-evaluation of the doctrine of 
transubstantiation [was] .. an atack on the central mediating role of the priesthood, an 
atack on its rights to be the exclusive handlers of Christ?s Body.?
22
 In other words, the 
Lollard asault on the Eucharist was also an asault on the Church in general, on its 
exclusive ability to mediate between the celestial and the mundane, and, perhaps most 
crucialy, on its sole authority to efect salvation in the laity. The comprehensive nature 
of such an atack was not lost on Wyclif?s virulently anti-clerical followers. Nor was it 
lost on the orthodox Church itself: by the end of the fourtenth century, the Eucharist had 
become not only the spiritual focus of the Mas but also, as Paul Strohm points out, a 
?litmus test of orthodoxy? and the point on which ?the Lollards? heresy was efectively 
                                                                                                                                            
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr?bner & Co, 1902), 12. Se also Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 
290-292. 
21
 Ane Hudson notes that other than the Eucharist, ?sacraments apart from confesion.. atracted litle 
consistent notice or coherent redirection? by Lolards. Se The Premature Reformation, 290. 
22
 Beckwith, Christ?s Body, 36. For a discusion of the authority granted to priests by their ability to 
perform the sacrament of the altar, se Rubin, Corpus Christi, especialy p. 49-53. 
104 
founded.?
23
 To mount a true defense against the Wyclifite threat, Saint Erkenwald 
needed not only to asert the requirement of orthodox baptism but also to afirm the 
orthodox view of the Eucharist. 
In an esay on Chaucer?s poetic response to the Lolard controversies, Fiona 
Somerset shows how, in the ?atmosphere of heightened concern over the division and 
multiplication of Christ?s body and over lay interpretation of the doctrine of the 
Eucharist,? The Summoner?s Tale is able to comment on the fourtenth-century 
eucharistic debate without ever mentioning it by name.
24
 Contemporary with the 
Summoner?s Tale, Saint Erkenwald is also positioned to indulge in similar, if far more 
polemical, double meanings. The poem, I suggest, uses its discussion of baptism to 
engage in a tacit, though no les important, argument for the sacrament of the Eucharist. 
In point of fact, the connection that the poem generates between the two sacraments has 
scriptural precedent. The Gospel of John turns to the Crucifixion itself to show the 
common origin of the water of baptism and the salvific blood of Christ: ?sed unus 
militum lancea latus eius aperuit, et continuo exivit sanguis, et aqua [But one of the 
soldiers with a spear opened his side, and imediately there came out blood and 
water].?
25
 A number of aliterative works often asociated with Saint Erkenwald also 
interogate this common origin. In Langland?s Piers Plowman, for example, the mortar 
of mercy in Piers?s barn, Unity, is made of Christ?s ?baptisme and blood !at he bledde 
on rode?; and in Pearl, the Pearl Maiden tels the Dreamer, ?Ryche blod ran on rode so 
                                                
23
 Strohm, England?s Empty Throne, 47. 
24
 Fiona Somerset, ?Here There and Everywhere? Wyclifite Conceptions of the Eucharist and Chaucer?s 
Other Lolard Joke,? in Somerset, Havens, and Pitard, Lolards and Their Influence in Late Medieval 
England, 127-138. 
25
 John 19:34. 
105 
roghe, / And wynne water; !en, at !at plyt, / "e grace of God wex gret innoughe.?
26
 By 
pointing out the mutual source of baptism and the Eucharist, such pasages suggest the 
intimate connection between sacramental water and sacramental blood and body. 
But there is another, even more pivotal reason that Saint Erkenwald is able to 
enact a thematic shift from baptism to the Eucharist: both sacraments are thoroughly 
marked by the presence ? even the necesity ? of sacramental language. Just as orthodox 
baptism requires the atending priest to utter a precise sacramental form, so too does the 
sacrament of the Eucharist require the priest to intone specific, biblical words ? hoc est 
corpus meum ? in order to transubstantiate bread into the body of Christ. As is the case 
with the words of baptism, the form of the sacramental words used to change bread to 
body is important to the work that those words do. Once again, John Mirk?s instructions 
provide a clear example of the precision demanded of those priests who uttered the 
eucharistic formula, in terms of the words themselves and even in terms of vocal 
inflection: 
Sey !e wordes of !at seruyse 
Deuowtely wyth gode a-vyse; 
Cotte !ow not !e wordes tayle, 
But sey hem oute wy!owte fayle; 
Sey hem so wy! mow!e & thoght, 
"at o!er !ynge !ow !enke noght 
But al !yn herte and !yn entent 
Be fully on that sacrament.
27
 
                                                
26
 Langland, Piers Plowman, 650 (B.19.323); The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanes, 
Patience, Sir Gawain and the Gren Knight, 4
th
 ed., ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Exeter: 
University of Exeter Pres, 202), 84 (l. 646-8). 
106 
The precision with which the priest must recite the eucharistic formula is itself a 
testament to the inherent power of the sacramental words and a tacit acknowledgement 
that they contain the potential to efect substantive change in the world around them. 
Such an emphasis also demonstrates a reverence for the specific nature of the change 
taking place, a change in which the subject of the host is entirely replaced by the very 
body of Christ even as the acidents of the host ? the physical signs that bread is bread ? 
remain. Informed as they are by the Word of God, the words of the priest are not to be 
uttered carelesly. As the Erkenwald-poet himself might suggest, the words of 
consecration should be uttered, ?and not one grue lenger? (319). 
 Recent historical and theological scholarship has confirmed the fundamental 
importance of the words of consecration to the Eucharist. David Aers emphasizes the 
roles of both priest and priestly language when he describes the doctrine of 
transubstantiation: ?At the words of consecration, spoken by a duly ordained priest, the 
body of Jesus .. became present under what had become the appearance of bread and 
wine lacking their proper substance.?
28
 Similarly, Eamon Duffy cals the Eucharist a rite 
in which ?only a priest might utter the words which transformed bread and wine into the 
flesh and blood of God incarnate,? and Miri Rubin, in her exhaustive study of the 
sacrament, describes how ?Christ?s body was sacramentaly made present though the 
words of a priest.?
 29
 Rubin also enumerates many treatises, such as Mirk?s instructions, 
                                                                                                                                            
27
 ?Say the words of that service [the Eucharist] devoutly and with god counsel. Do not cut of the words? 
tails, but say them out without fail. Say them that way with your mouth and your thoughts, and do not 
think of other things, but put al your heart and your intent fuly on that sacrament.? Kristenson, Mirk?s 
Instructions, 16-167 (l. 175-1782 [translation mine]). 
28
 Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 2. 
29
 Eamon Dufy, The Striping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 140 ? c. 1580 (New 
Haven, CT: Yale University Pres, 192), 109; Rubin, Corpus Christi, 53. 
107 
that were writen to asist clergy in performing the sacrament correctly. The existence of 
such treatises strongly suggests the danger perceived in mispeaking the sacramental 
words. Arguing on grounds both theological and linguistic, Catherine Pickstock, ties 
sacrament to utterance even more closely: ?Not only is language that which administers 
the sacrament to us, but conversely, the Eucharist underlies al language, since in carying 
the absence that characterizes every sign to an extreme (no body appears in the bread), it 
also delivers a final disclosure, or presence (the bread is the Body), which alone makes it 
possible now to trust every sign.?
30
 Finaly, in a formulation that brings together the 
Word of God, the words of the priest, and the incarnate body itself, Herbert McCabe 
argues that ?the Eucharist is the creative language of God, his eternal word made flesh.?
31
  
The sacrament of the Eucharist was central to the late medieval Church, and at the center 
of that sacrament were the words of consecration themselves. 
 Thus, we should not be surprised that as Wyclif and his followers leveled a 
general critique at what Rubin cals the ?sacerdotal-sacramental eficacy? of the 
eucharistic sacrament, they also questioned more specificaly the ability of the priest?s 
words to efect transubstantiation.
32
 Wyclifite positions on the Eucharist have been 
particularly wel documented, but we should recognize that Wyclif himself held a far 
more nuanced position on the mater than is generaly recognized. In brief, he argued 
that after the priest?s sacramental utterance, the bread remained unchanged in both 
                                                
30
 Catherine Pickstock, ?Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist,? in Catholicism and Catholicity: 
Eucharistic Comunities in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Sarah Beckwith (Oxford: 
Blackwel Publishers Ltd., 199), 5. 
31
 Herbert McCabe, ?The Eucharist and Language,? in Beckwith, Catholicism and Catholicity, 20. 
32
 Rubin, Corpus Christi, 328. 
108 
subject and acident but that the spiritual esence of the body of Christ was added to it.
33
  
Such an argument stood in stark opposition to Church teachings, which stated that the 
sacramental words hoc est corpus meum did not afect the acidents ? the outward, 
sensual appearances ? of bread; rather, they caused the Body of Christ to replace the 
subject of bread altogether, leaving the bread?s acidents intact. One critical diference 
between the Church?s view and Wyclif?s, then, lay in the exact work that the sacramental 
utterance performed: whereas the Church maintained that the priest?s words caused the 
miracle of transubstantiation, Wyclif, who considered it logicaly impossible for an 
acident to exist without its subject, argued that those same words merely efected a 
proces of spiritual addition. In the face of this imensely important diference, Wyclif?s 
arguments against orthodox transubstantiation nonetheles grant considerable power to 
the words of consecration. Indeed, in Wyclif?s view the sacramental words spoken by the 
priest do perform an action; it is simply not the action the Church claimed that they 
perform. Wyclif writes: ?crist ha! !yue power I-nowe to his prestis to teche his churche; 
& enioyned hem siche office !at !yue! hem not occasioun to synne. & !us power !at 
prestis han stande! not in transsubstansinge of !e oste, ne in makyng of acidentis for to 
stonde bi hemsilf.?
34
 Rather than denying the power of the priest?s words, Wyclif dilutes 
their eficacy both in kind (because they perform an act of addition rather than one of 
substitution) and in degre (because they ultimately lack the ability to make acidents 
stand alone without their subject). The question suggested by Wyclif?s formulation of the 
                                                
33
 Se Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 282. 
34
 Wyclif, ?Of Confesion,? in The English Works of John Wyclif, 345. 
109 
Eucharist, then, is not, ?Are the words uttered by the priest efective?? but rather, ?What 
specific efect do those sacramental words have?? 
 In his asault on the Eucharist, Wyclif cals into question the ability of the priest?s 
words to make acidents stand alone without their subjects; similarly, in his atacks on 
orthodox baptism, the disident theologian obviates the necesity of the baptismal prayer 
in the act of christening. As I have argued above, the ability of language to enact 
transubstantiation and christening is a key point of contact between the two sacraments. 
Eucharist and baptism share yet another relationship ? one particularly germane to Saint 
Erkenwald ? that enables the later to operate as an especialy efective metaphor for the 
former: both are a means of conversion. Discussing how religious conversion in the 
Middle Ages was grounded in the metaphor of Christ?s death and rebirth, Peter Cramer 
argues that ?to be converted by baptism, or by the periodic ?conversion? of the Eucharist, 
[was] to take part in this metaphor, to pas with this metaphor from physical to spiritual 
being.?
35
 Moreover, the very term ?conversion,? as Cramer sems to recognize, suggests 
both spiritual conversion (heathen to Christian) and substantial conversion (bread to 
body). This asociation of religious conversion with transubstantiation also finds support 
in religious texts roughly contemporary with Saint Erkenwald. A fiftenth-century 
English translation of the De Imitatione Christi, for example, describes the act of 
conversion in Pauline terms that suggest nothing so much as the proces of 
transubstantiation: ?A man conuertyng him holy to god, is exute [stripped, divested] & 
taken fro !e body & chaunged into a newe man.?
36
 Here, conversion is not only 
                                                
35
 Cramer, Baptism and Change, 35. 
36
 The Earliest English Translation of the De Imitatione Christi, ed. John K. Ingram, EETS e.s. 63 (London: 
Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr?bner & Co., 1893), 4. 
110 
analogous to transubstantiation, it is mietic of transubstantiation: the convert is 
metaphoricaly taken from his own body ? we might say his subject is removed from his 
acidents ? and ?chaunged? into a new, Christian man. McCabe argues that ?sacraments 
are sacramental by their relationship to the Eucharist? and
 
that the Eucharist becomes a 
kind of arch-sacrament through which other sacraments gain their eficacy.
37
 Such arch-
sacramentality is evident in De Imitatione Christi. It is not without reason that the 
baptismal conversion described in that work asumes a distinctly eucharistic shape: the 
transformative model of the Eucharist underlies the very act of conversion itself. 
 Crucialy, Saint Erkenwald begins with an act of conversion sui generis, the 
Christianization of England and its Saxon inhabitants by Saint Augustine of Canterbury: 
"en wos this reame renaide mony ronke !eres 
Til Saynt Austyn into Sandewiche was sende fro !e pope; 
"en prechyd he here !e pure faythe and plantyd !e trouthe 
And conuertyd ale !e communnates to Cristendame newe. 
He turnyd temples !at tyme !at temyd to !e deuele 
And clansyd hom in Cristes nome and kyrkes hom calid; 
He hurlyd owt hor ydols and hade hym in sayntes 
And chaungit cheuely hor nomes and chargit hom beter: 
"at ere was of Appolyn is now of Saynt Petre, 
Mahoun to Saynt Margrete o!ir to Maudelayne; 
"e synagoge of !e Sonne was set to oure Lady, 
Jubiter and Jono to Jhesus o!er to James. 
                                                
37
 McCabe, ?The Eucharist and Language,? in Beckwith, Catholicism and Catholicity, 23. 
111 
So he hom dedifiet and dyght ale to dere halowes 
"at ere wos set of Sathanas in Saxones tyme. (11-24)
38
 
The sheer swiftnes of Augustine?s barnstorming conversion of England, suggested by 
the frenetic pace of the pasage itself, practicaly begs us to ask how genuine and 
efective such a conversion could have been, a question that the poem?s modern readers 
have been al too keen to ask. Christine Chism, for example, states that ?the past is 
transformed by a cosmetic reversal more gestural and linguistic than esential; the 
temples are ?turned? but not fundamentaly altered, ?clansyd? but not reconstructed.?
39
  
The poem?s description of Augustine?s conversion, however, hews closely to the acount 
given in Bede?s eighth-century Historia Eclesiastica, a text that treats the same event 
without the skepticism and anxious uncertainty that Chism locates in the aliterative 
poem. Most provocative is Bede?s report of a mesage from Pope Gregory to Augustine 
and his felow eclesiastics in which the pope advises that the pagan temples be left 
standing.: 
Uidelicet, quia fana idolorum destrui in eadem gente minime debeant; sed 
ipsa, quae in eis sunt, idola destruantur; aqua benedicta fiat, in eisdem 
fanis aspergatur; altaria construantur, reliquiae ponantur. Quia, si fana 
eadem bene constructa sunt, necese est, ut a cultu daemonum in obsequio 
ueri Dei debeant commutari [The temples of the idols in that nation 
                                                
38
 ?Then was this realm renegade for many rough years until Saint Augustine [of Canterbury] was sent to 
Sandwich by the Pope. Then he preached here the pure faith and planted the truth and converted al the 
comunities anew to Christendom. He turned temples that at the time belonged to the devil and cleansed 
them in Christ?s name and caled them churches. He hurled out idols and had in saints, and he chiefly 
changed their names and rendered them beter: that once was of Apolo is now of Saint Peter, Mohamed 
to Saint Margaret or to Magdalene. The Synagogue of the Sun was set to Our Lady; Jupiter and Juno to 
either Jesus or James. So he dedicated them [the temples] and gave to al [the saints] the halowed spaces 
that before were set to Satan in Saxon times.? 
39
 Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 65. 
112 
[England] ought not be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be 
destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let 
altars be erected, and relics placed. For if those temples are wel built, it is 
requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service 
of the true God].
40
   
Later in the same mesage, Gregory argues that preserving the external form of the pagan 
temples wil make the conversion of the Saxons more rather than les efective: 
Ut dum gens ipsa eadem fana sua non uidet destrui, de corde erorem 
deponat, et Deum uerum cognoscens ac adorans, ad loca, quae consueuit, 
familiarius concurrat. [The nation, seing that their temples are not 
destroyed, may remove eror from their hearts, and knowing and adoring 
the true God, may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they 
have been acustomed].
41
   
Such advice is followed to the leter by Saint Erkenwald?s Augustine, who quickly 
renames temples churches, cleanses them in Christ?s name, and replaces their idols with 
saints. The linguistic changes that Augustine makes, though swift and largely invisible, 
nonetheles simultaneously signify and alow for the deeper spiritual changes taking 
place within. 
 Although Saint Erkenwald never mentions transubstantiation directly, the 
mechanism behind the conversions efected by Augustine finds a clear paralel in the 
mechanism of the orthodox Eucharist, a sacrament in which the subject of the body of 
                                                
40
 The Venerable Bede, Historiam Eclesiasticam, in Opera Historica, ed. Carolus Plumer (Oxford: 
Clarendon, 1896), 1:65; Translation from Bede?s Eclesiastical History and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. 
and trans. J. A. Giles (London: George Bel & Sons, 1903), 55-56. 
41
 Bede, Historiam Ecclesiasticam, 1:65; trans. Bede?s Eclesiastical History, 56. 
113 
Christ entirely replaces the subject of bread even as the acidents of bread, those physical 
signs that tel our eyes and mouths that bread is bread, remain. As Monika Otter notes, 
?On the one hand [Augustine?s conversion] aserts a radical change from paganism to 
Christianity; on the other hand, it aserts material continuity from one state to the 
other.?
42
  Otter?s analysis, which takes into consideration both the spiritual rupture and 
the physical stability of Augustine?s conversions, underscores these paralels. Like the 
priest performing the ritual of transubstantiation, the work that Augustine performs is 
mainly the work of sacramental speech. That the pagan temples are, externaly, stil 
pagan temples after Augustine has dubbed them churches is precisely the point; we can 
consider the consecrated pagan edifices to be temples in acident only, buildings that 
contain the subject of churches within. The poem reinforces this subject/acident binary 
when it relates how Augustine ?hurlyd owt hor ydols and hade hym in sayntes? (17). 
Here, the saint within the temple becomes the holy subject within the profane acident, 
the body within the bread, the physical sign of the otherwise invisible change that the 
speech act has engendered. 
 The mechanism of change described in both Bede?s Historia and in the aliterative 
Saint Erkenwald clearly echoes the act of transubstantiation; while explicitly invoking 
baptismal conversion, the poem also evokes the language used to describe the Eucharist 
in the fourtenth and early fiftenth centuries. When Saint Erkenwald relates how 
Augustine ?turnyd temples !at tyme !at temyd to !e deuele/ And clansyd hom in Cristes 
nome and kyrkes hom calid? (15-16, emphasis mine), the poem employs a word 
frequently connected to orthodox descriptions of transubstantiation in Middle English 
                                                
42
 Monica Oter, ??Newe Werke?: St. Erkenwald, St. Albans, and the Medieval Sense of the Past,? Journal 
of Medieval and Renaisance Studies 24 (194): 387-414. 
114 
treatises: turnyd.  Moreover, by including that word in a hyperaliterative line ? aa/ax 
rather than the usual a/ax ? the poet actively uses the form of the poem to cal this key 
term to our atention.
43
 As early as 1303, Robert Mannyng of Brunne?s Handlyng Synne 
refers to the Eucharist as a sacrament in which the words of consecration cause ?!e 
lyk?nes of bred and wyne, / Yn fleshe and blode to turne hit ynne.?
44
 Later, a mid-
fiftenth-century translation of Speculum Humanae Salvationis glosses the word 
?transsubstanciate? as ?turned fro o kinde of substaunce to anothere.?
 45
 Both of these 
instances suggest that ?turned? was a common synonym for the more technical 
eclesiastical term, but they are not alone in doing so. In his explicitly anti-Lollard Reule 
of Crysten Religioun, dated 1443, Reginald Pecock describes the sacrament of the 
Eucharist as ?!e taking of bred and wijn.. and !e blesing and halewing and turnyng of 
hem into cristis very body and blood.?
46
 Similarly, in the early to mid-fourtenth-
century translation of Guilaume de Deguilevile?s Le P?lerinage de la Vie Humaine, the 
alegorical figure of Reason ?turned.. bred into quik flesh? and ?wyn.. into red blood?; a 
fre translation of Grosseteste?s Chateau d?Amour from the same period explains that 
?Thurgh the vertue of cristes wordes of the sacrament / That the prest reherces at his 
                                                
43
 I am indebted to Frank Grady for this bringing this particular point to my atention. 
44
 Robert of Brune?s ?Handlyng Syne,? ed. Frederick Furnival, EETS o.s. 19 (London: Kegan Paul, 
Trench, Tr?bner & Co., 1901), 31 (l. 971-9972). The dates of the texts discused in the folowing two 
paragraphs range from 1303 (Robert of Brune?s Handlyng Syne) to 143 (Pecock?s Reule of Crysten 
Religioun). Such a wide range of dates only reinforces the availability of this eucharistic terminology to 
the Erkenwald poet, whose poem was likely writen in the 1380s or 90s. That range also sugests the 
dificulty of afixing a specific date to St. Erkenwald. Although the question of the poem?s exact date is 
outside the scope of this study, we can say with certainty that the Erkenwald poet had aces to this sort of 
language describing the proces of transubstantiation. For a general survey of opinions on the date of the 
poem, se Peterson?s introduction to Saint Erkenwald, 1-15. 
45
 The Mirour of Mans Saluacioun: A Midle English Translation of Speculum Humanae Salvationis, ed. 
Avril Henry (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Pres, 1986), 105. 
46
 Pecock?s Reule of Crysten Religioun, ed. Wiliam Gret, EETS o.s. 171 (London: Oxford University 
Pres, 1927), 263. 
115 
mese with gode entent, / Brede in to cristes flesc#, & wyne in to his blode, / Sudanly is 
turned.?
47
 Most compelingly, an anti-Wyclifite sermon, probably delivered to a lay 
audience in London near the end of the fourtenth-century, extols ?!e vertew of !e 
wordes !at !e prest seis at !e mase, !at !e bred turne! in-to Goddes [fleshe] and his 
blode.?
48
 
 The Erkenwald-poet also employs sacramental language in the phrase that 
emphasizes the primacy of Augustine?s speech act in the conversion of the pagan 
temples: ?And chaungit cheuely hor nomes? (18). A sermon on the Lord?s Prayer dating 
to either the late fourtenth-century or early fiftenth-century relates how ?ate !e bord, / 
!are changede bred to god alone, / !orw prestes wordes on !e auter stone,? while a 
manuscript of Peraldus?s Summa of Vice from the same period remarks, ?!ou! it seme 
wonderful and a!eynes kynde !at brede turne into flesche and wynne into blode.., !at 
blesynge is above kynde, and of more my!t, and chaunge! !inge out of o kynde into 
ano!er.?
49
 Even as Saint Erkenwald narates Augustine?s mas conversions of the sixth 
and seventh-centuries, the poem?s linguistic register echoes contemporary language 
concerning the Eucharist.
50
 In ?turnyng? the temples and ?chaunging? the idols that 
                                                
47
 The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, ed. Avril Henry, EETS o.s. 28 and 292 (Oxford: Oxford 
University Pres, 1985 and 198), 1:19; ?The Myrour of Lewed Men (By a Sawley Monk),? in The Minor 
Poems of the Vernon MS, Part. 1, ed. Carl Horstman, EETS o.s. 98 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 
Tr?bner & Co., 1892), 428. 
48
 ?Sermon 2,? in Midle English Sermons, ed. Wodburn O. Ros, EETS o.s. 209 (London: Oxford 
University Pres, 1940), 129. 
49
 ?A Sermon on the Lord?s Prayer,? ed. Frank A. Paterson, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 
16 (1916): 413-14 (l.357-359); ?An Ilustrated Fragment of Perdalus?s Suma of Vice: Harleian MS 
324,? ed. Michael Evans, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 67 (l. 273-2279). 
50
 One diference betwen these two eucharistic keywords as they apear in Saint Erkenwald and as they 
apear in most paralels cited here is that in the paralels, the words are frequently found in prepositional 
verb phrases ? ?turne into? rather than simply ?turne.? I maintain, however, that the similarity in the words 
used to describe the two sacraments is significant. An earlier citation from this esay helps make this case: 
116 
dwel within them, Augustine performs much more than a simple ?linguistic sleight of 
hand?; his conversion of those temples ? indeed, his conversion of the entire island ? 
adumbrates the very sacrament that would, by the first years of the fiftenth-century, 
become the central and defining feature of the liturgy in England.
51
 
 Against this semantic and intertextual backdrop, the isue raised by the opening 
lines of Saint Erkenwald involves not simply the validity of Augustine?s haried 
conversion of England but the very nature of the priest?s words in the sacrament of the 
Eucharist. More specificaly, the poem seks in its opening salvo to answer the two 
questions most crucial to the debate over the Eucharist, namely, (1) are the sacramental 
words efective, and (2), if so, do they do what the Church says they do: create the 
subject of Christ?s body within the acidents ? and only the acidents ? of bread? As I 
have already suggested, the eucharistic terminology in the pasage should alay doubt 
about the eficacy of Augustine?s mas conversion; to emphasize its point further, 
however, the poem oves from Augustine of Canterbury to his eclesiastical succesor 
and heir apparent, Bishop Erkenwald.
52
 This important line of descent asks us to 
understand Erkenwald as a kind of Anglo-Saxon Augustine, a figure whose confrontation 
and ultimate conversion of an individual pagan is foreshadowed by Augustine?s mas 
conversions centuries earlier. In fact, such a lineal relationship finds ample support 
                                                                                                                                            
?A man conuertyng him holy to god, is .. chaunged into a newe man? (Ingrahm, The Earliest English 
Translation of the De Imitatione Christi, 4). In this pasage, where the subject is clearly conversion, we 
se the same verb-preposition construction as in the eucharistic references cited above. At the very least, 
the paralel vocabularies of conversion and the Eucharist alow the former to sugest the later. It is such 
linguistic cros-referencing, I would argue, that helps facilitate the thematic move from baptism to the 
Eucharist in the poem. 
51
 Nis?, ?A Coroun Ful Riche,? 27. On the centrality of the Eucharist to late medieval orthodoxy, se 
Strohm, England?s Empty Throne, 45-53.  
52
 Again, Frank Grady has helped me both to clarify my thinking and to refine my prose here, particularly 
by observing that the ?eucharistic keywords? in this pasage serve to answer rather than to raise questions 
regarding the eficacy of Augustine?s spech. 
117 
outside the poem. The twelfth-century Vita Sancti Erkenwaldi ? which, along with 
Bede?s Historia, provides much of our knowledge of the historical Bishop Erkenwald ? 
opens with the conversion of England and the spread of Christianity throughout the 
nation: 
Like a radiant beam of sunlight was this Augustine, and the first to teach 
the true way of life in the se of the church of Canterbury. From Kent he 
in turn dispatched Melitus, his comrade in the sacred struggle, to the 
country of the East Saxons, whose capital city, London, was situated on 
the river Thames. There King Ethelbert built a church in honor of Paul, 
the preacher to the Gentiles, and there the aforesaid Melitus performed 
the office of bishop. And thus it came to pas that a certain smal boy 
named Erkenwald, young in years but mature in mind, would hasten to 
hear the teaching of Bishop Melitus.
53
 
Like the aliterative poem, in which Erkenwald is described as the bishop ?of !is 
Augustynes art? (33), the Vita Sancti Erkenwaldi posits a direct line of descent from 
Augustine to Erkenwald. Indeed, while most editors of Saint Erkenwald gloss the phrase 
?!is Augustynes art? as ?this Augustine?s district,? the phrase has the additional sense of 
?this Augustine?s art,? the techniques and principles of Augustine?s position, the tools of 
his salvific trade.
54
  Thus, Erkenwald?s confrontation and interogation of the pagan 
                                                
53
 The Saint of London: The Life and Miracles of St. Erkenwald, ed. and trans. E. Gordon Whatley 
(Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaisance Texts and Studies, 1989), 87. 
54
 The Midle English Dictionary defines art as ?the principles and practices of such organized fields of 
knowledge and activity as law, medicine, theology, philosophy, literary composition, alchemy, astrology, 
and magic? and as ?Knowledge or know-how as aplied to a situation or a problem, ability to aply or 
practice an ?art.?? It also states that art can mean ?a district or locality,? a definition for which it employs 
line 3 of Saint Erkenwald as an example. (MED, s.v. ?art? n.) The glosaries of thre major, modern 
editions of Saint Erkenwald ? those of Peterson (197), Ruth Morse (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1975), 
and Henry Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Pres, 1926) ? uniformly folow the later entry, 
118 
corpse, lying so perfectly preserved in his splendid sarcophagus that he appears to have 
?sodanly slippide opon slepe? (92), becomes a more intimate reiteration of the work 
already performed by his spiritual predecesor. We are invited to judge the validity of 
Augustine?s earlier conversions by observing, in almost microscopic detail, the succes of 
Erkenwald?s later one. 
 The poem quickly establishes the eficacy of Bishop Erkenwald?s speech. Upon 
returning to London from Esex, Erkenwald hears High Mas and prays for divine 
guidance in untangling the mystery presented by the corpse. Then he surrounds himself 
with the symbols of eclesiastical authority, approaching the open sarcophagus with 
?mony ma!ti men and macers before hym? (143), ?riche reuestid? (139) in his priestly 
finery. Only with the full weight of his clerical authority quite literaly upon his 
shoulders does Erkenwald finaly addres the preserved pagan judge: 
Then he turnes to !e toumbe and talkes to !e corce, 
Lyftande vp his eghe-lyddes he loused suche wordes: 
?Now lykhame !at !er lies, layne !ou no lenger; 
Sythen Jhesus has iuggit to-day His ioy to be schewyde, 
Be !ou bone to His bode, I bydde in His behalue.? (177-181) 
                                                                                                                                            
defining art as ?province? (Peterson) and ?district? (Morse, Savage). In his translation of Peterson?s 
edition, Casey Finch gloses the entire line as ?Now Saint Erkenwald?s bishop of Augustine?s se.? Se 
The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet, trans. Casey Finch, ed. Malcolm Andrew, Ronald Waldron, and 
Cliford Peterson (Berkeley: University of California Pres, 193), 325. None of these translations takes 
into acount that Augustine was specificaly archbishop of Canterbury, while Erkenwald was the bishop of 
London, a fact that sems at ods with the traditional translation. 
   A cursory survey of fourtenth and fiftenth-century aliterative poetry bears out the second definition of 
art as ?knowledge? or ?principles and practices.? In Piers Plowman, Anima tels the dreamer of 
?Astronomiens? who ?alday in hir art failen,? a phrase in which art clearly means science or craft; and in 
Wars of Alexander, Alexander questions Anectanabus as he practices his quasi-religious ?arte? of 
astrology. Se Langland, Piers Plowman, 56 (l. B.15.359); Wars of Alexander, 19 (l. 681). In adition, 
the poet of Sir Gawain and the Gren Knight uses the word to describe the arts and practices of chivalry 
and courtly love: Gawain playfuly tels the Lady of Hautdesert that she ?weldex more slyht / Of !at art? 
than even he does. Andrew and Waldron, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 264 (l.1542-1543). 
119 
Though the pasage notes that Erkenwald physicaly opens the corpse?s eyelids, the 
emphasis in these lines is most explicitly on the force of his language, on the words 
?loused? on behalf of Christ Himself, the Word of God made flesh. The corpse confirms 
as much when he says, ?!i bode is me dere. / I may not bot boghe to !i bone for bothe 
myn eghen? (193-4). It is Bishop Erkenwald?s words that have enabled the pagan judge 
to speak, his words that are, in the parlance of modern linguistics, ?ontologicaly and 
causaly prior? to the action.
55
 And while the utterance that reanimated the corpse is not 
connected to a specific sacrament per se, it is closely analogous to sacramental speech in 
that it is ?bydde [bidden] in His behalue,? (181) filed with the authority of God?s Word 
itself. Erkenwald?s command to the pagan operates in much the same manner as the 
sacramental formulae we have already observed. Like the utterances ?I folowe the, or 
eles I crystene !e, in the nome of / the fader & !e sone and the holy gost? and ?hoc est 
corpus meum,? it efects change in the world into which it is uttered. 
 Following the reanimation of the corpse, the poem recounts Erkenwald?s 
interogation of the judge and the judge?s own self-revelation. Although I focus in this 
chapter only on the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, it is worth pausing to 
consider other sacramental aspects of this scene, specificaly its confesional 
connotations. Like baptism and the Eucharist, auricular confesion is a sacrament 
marked by the presence of necesary speech, both on the part of the sinner (who verbaly 
enumerates sins) and, more especialy, on the part of the confesor (who grants verbal 
absolution). Donning his liturgical, clerical vestments, Erkenwald atends to the judge?s 
story much as he might atend to the confesion of a penitent; when the bishop at last 
                                                
55
 Swetser, ?Blended Spaces and Performativity,? 310. 
120 
does pres the judge to speak about the state of his soul, we learn that the judge, righteous 
as he might have been on earth, is nonetheles guilty of that Original Sin of ?Adam oure 
alder !at ete of !at appulle / "at mony a ply!tles pepul has poysned for euer? (295-6). No 
mater that the noble judge, born many years before Christ, was never in the position to 
achieve Christian grace in his lifetime; like al sinners, he could not receive God?s mercy 
without ?shrift of mou! / to make to prest [his] synnis cou! / opinli ham to knaw.?
56
  
Such is the hard-line that Saint Erkenwald takes: in order for the judge to atain salvation, 
the spoken words of confesion must precede the cleansing of his soul. As a response to 
Wyclifite arguments privileging the internal state of contrition over the externaly 
directed practice of oral confesion, the poem?s unwavering insistence on confesion is 
yet another afirmation of orthodoxy. 
 The judge?s de facto confesion brings us back to the climactic scene itself: 
Erkenwald?s conditionaly sacramental, acidentaly orthodox, tearfuly baptismal 
utterance. The eficacy of Erkenwald?s sacramental speech, established by the 
reanimation of the corpse and, to a leser degre, Erkenwald?s role as confesor, is 
reconfirmed at the moment of christening. But to the chalenges raised by Wyclif and the 
Lollards concerning the Eucharist, the orthodox baptism and the eficacious words of 
baptism themselves can only provide a partial response. As we have sen, Wyclif 
concedes that the sacramental words uttered by the priest during his performance of the 
Eucharist create the body of Christ within the host; he argues that they create ?veri goddis 
bodi in forme of bred.?
57
 What Wyclif denies is that the acidents of bread can exist in 
                                                
56
 Cursor Mundi, Part 5, ed. Richard Moris, EETS o.s. 68 (London: Oxford University Pres, 1878), 1484 
(Fairfax S, 26,092-26,094). 
57
 John Wyclif, ?De Sacramento Altaris,? in The English Works of John Wyclif, 357. 
121 
that same host if their subject has been wholly replaced by Corpus Christi. With this in 
mind, I want to suggest that the poem?s final gesture toward orthodoxy ? its thematic and 
linguistic masterstroke ? is that the baptismal proces through which the pagan judge 
pases becomes a metaphor for the sacrament of the Eucharist itself, a formulation that 
alows the poem to strike at the heart of the Wyclifite atack on orthodox doctrine.  
 The groundwork for this metaphor is laid with the event that precipitates the bulk 
of the narative, the discovery of the sarcophagus in the foundation of Saint Paul?s. 
Initialy, the poem lavishes a great deal of atention upon the tomb?s materiality, upon its 
?thykke ston thryuandly hewen? (47), its ?gargeles.. of gray marbre? (48), and the 
inscrutable ?bry!t golde letres? (51) with which it is encrusted. When the lid is lifted, 
however, atention shifts to the body within, and the tomb is largely forgotten. 
Erkenwald is summoned, and, speaking in his capacity as bishop, he invests the ancient 
pagan with a kind of half-life, a state between the morbidity of the preserved corpse and 
the animated vivacity of Erkenwald himself.
58
 But in the end, it is only in the moment of 
the baptism ? when Erkenwald laments to God the pagan?s lifelesnes, speaks the 
baptismal formula, and baptizes the pagan?s face with his tears ? that the judge lives, that 
he joins the bodies politic and eclesiastic that Erkenwald overses. It is at this moment 
too, ?as sone as !e soul was sesyd in blise? (345), that the body disintegrates. Just as in 
the proces of transubstantiation, one subject has replaced the other: the subject of bread 
is annihilated and replaced with the life-giving body of Christ; the corpse of the heathen 
is annihilated and replaced with the newly christened and eternaly living soul. It is 
significant, therefore, that the pagan should describe the experience of salvation in terms 
                                                
58
 For a more thorough discusion of the corpse?s life-in-death status, se Wiliam A. Quin, ?The 
Psychology of St. Erkenwald,? Medium ?vum 53 (1984): 180-193. 
122 
reminiscent of the Eucharist and even of the Last Supper itself: once ?Hungrie in-wyt 
hele-hole? (307) and unable to join in the communion of heaven, the newly christened 
judge now reports, ?Ry!t now to soper my soule is sete at !e table? (338). What remains 
unchanged through al of this is the physical artifact of the tomb, the sarcophagus that 
contained the body of the judge and in which his miraculous transformation took place. 
Covered with inscrutable mesages and golden, ?roynyshe? (52) leters, the sarcophagus 
becomes a hollow signifier, the physical vesel that remains after the corpse within has 
been fundamentaly and subjectively altered. Here, remaining behind after the 
transformation and, indeed, the physical obliteration of its contents, is the acident 
without its subject, the logical impossibility that Wyclif and his followers sought so 
fervently to deny. 
 If the moment of the judge?s conversion ? the moment of the judge?s 
transubstantiation ? is to be read as both an answer to Lollard arguments and an 
afirmation of the Eucharist itself, the closing four lines of Saint Erkenwald stand as a 
testament to the communal power of that sacrament: 
"en wos louynge oure Lorde wyt loves vp-halden, 
Meche mournynge and myrthe was melyd to-geder; 
"ai pasyd forthe in procesioun and ale !e pepulle folowid 
And ale !e beles in !e burghe beryd at ones. (349-352) 
Recent scholarship on the Eucharist has discussed the critical social work that it 
performed. Sarah Beckwith proposes that as ?the medium though which social conflict is 
often worked out in social rite, ritual and drama,? the sacrament of Eucharist ?provides a 
language through which the relationship of self to society is articulated on a 
123 
individualized basis.? More darkly, David Aers documents the alarmist view held in late 
medieval England that ?any interogation of the Church?s current [orthodox] 
understanding of sacramental signs disolves the union of the faithful in the mystical 
body of Christ, the Church, and consequently the order of the earthly city.?
59
 As both of 
these examples suggest, the Eucharist must ultimately be understood not simply as a 
sacrament that efects the salvation of the person or even of the congregation but ?as an 
esential action within the Church which constantly reproduces the Church? and that, in 
turn, alows for the existence of an orderly, civil society.
60
 In the conversion of the pagan 
judge, we witnes the transformative potential of the sacrament for the individual, but in 
the conversion of the London citizenry from a ?grete prece? (141) of agitated, nearly 
riotous citizens to the orderly ?procesioun? moving away from the site of the miracle, 
we se that potential writ large: body from bread; Christian from pagan; Church from 
rabble; society from mob.
61
 Finaly, in the very presence of the miraculous, Saint 
Erkenwald reveals to us the concordant civic body so menaced by the encroachment of 
Wyclifism. In so doing, the poem also alows us to glimpse, under the toling bels of 
London, the potential of eucharistic community and the promise of sacramental 
orthodoxy fulfiled. 
 
                                                
59
 Beckwith, Christ?s Body, 41; Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 9. Rubin makes a similar contention about the 
social function of the sacrament, arguing that ?power and aesthetics turned the Eucharist into the 
batleground where the new vision of Christian society would be won or lost? in Corpus Christi, 2. 
60
 Pickstock, ?Quest for the Eucharist,? 51. 
61
 Aers (Sanctifying Signs, 74) writes that ?the late medieval Church had made the reception of the bread 
and wine, the body and blod, a suplementary adjunct to the Eucharist, whose esence was now defined as 
the act of consecration.? Such an argument resonates with Saint Erkenwald?s image of the citizens of 
London watching, one can only imagine amazed, the miracle of the judge?s own transubstantiation. For 
another discusion of the poem?s final procesion, se Chism, Aliterative Revivals, 63-65. 
124 
Right and Truth, Law and Mercy 
By focusing on eficacious language in the orthodox sacraments, I have argued 
that the aliterative Saint Erkenwald is a thoroughly anti-Wyclifite work, a poem with an 
aggresive, even polemical, orthodox agenda. In this capacity the empty sarcophagus and 
the redeemed judge become the metaphorical embodiment of accidentia sine subjecto 
and operate as a direct refutation of the Wyclifites? most pernicious argument. But the 
sarcophagus and the preserved pagan judge are also, quite literaly, a sarcophagus and a 
preserved pagan judge; they are two trespasers from the pre-Christian past, suddenly and 
insistently brought into contact with a decidedly Christian present. Pulled from the earth 
into the living stream of history, these relics raise questions that transcend the poem?s 
imediate stance contra Lollardy and ask us to consider the fraught relationship between 
the present and the past and, more urgently, between Christianity and its pre-Christian 
antecedents.
62
 
 It is no coincidence that the poem?s culminating anti-Wyclifite images ? the 
empty sarcophagus and the transubstantiated judge ? so conspicuously recal the 
historical foundations of English Christianity. Inded, the connections between Lollardy, 
pre-Christian heathenism, and the spoken word suggested by those images are crucialy 
important to Saint Erkenwald?s wider poetic project. In the second half of this chapter I 
wil investigate those connections further, identifying a strategy within Saint Erkenwald 
whereby the poet atempts to asimilate the threatening and novel Wyclifite heresies into 
the more familiar, typological schema by which medieval Christianity defined itself. 
                                                
62
 Chism (Aliterative Revivals, p. 41) argues that ?the poem spotlights the tremendous desire and fear 
directed toward the revenant from the pagan past and the historical risk that any genuinely new ork must 
transact.? My own argument, predicated as it is on representations of spech and language, is significantly 
diferent than hers, though it owes a great debt to the ground she has already broken. 
125 
More specificaly, I wil show how the Erkenwald-poet explores these broad cultural and 
theological isues by considering the eficacy and function of speech. This mode of 
exploration is imediately evident in the figure of the pagan judge himself, an individual 
whose unering verdicts of guilt and innocence (?I remewit neuer fro !e ri!t by reson myn 
awen / For to drese a wrange dome, no day of my lyue.? [235-236]) and whose spoken 
self-presentation (?Fyrst to say the !e sothe quo my selfe were..? [197]) provide pre-
Christian counterpoints to Bishop Erkenwald?s explicitly Christian, sacramental speech 
acts. The entire poem, I argue, operates within a linguistic register that highlights 
fundamental connections and disjunctions between the heathen judge and the seventh-
century bishop, evoking at the same time theologicaly loaded concepts of law and truth 
that not only undergird the medieval debate over righteous heathens but inform edieval 
Christianity?s relationship to its closest relative, Judaism. 
 
Richard Firth Gren?s recent discussion of the word truth in late medieval England 
provides a point of departure for this analysis. Gren argues that ?in late fourtenth-
century England trowthe was, in Raymond Wiliams?s sense of the term, a keyword?: 
more specificaly, he establishes that by the fourtenth century truth, ?had acquired a 
considerable range of meanings, that some of these meanings were felt to be new and 
dificult, and that the overlaps between them were complex and potentialy ambiguous.? 
Indeed, Gren suggests that by the Ricardian period, truth had become ?the archetypal 
keyword in English,? a profoundly multivalent term that found currency in four separate 
semantic fields ? legal, ethical, theological, and intelectual ? and whose meaning was 
126 
both complicated and enhanced by these fields? mutual interpenetration.
63
 Discussing the 
word truth in Piers Plowman in these very terms, Frank Grady points to the sentence ?Ne 
wolde neuere trewe god bote trewe treuthe were aloued? as evidence that Langland is 
?aware, and ready to exploit .. the word?s overlapping senses and the permeability of the 
boundaries between them.?
64
 We might also consider Book of the Duches?s ?trewly for 
to speke of trouthe? (999) and Confesio Amantis?s ?Som man, whan he most trewe 
appiereth, / Thanne is he forthest fro the trowthe? as moments in fourtenth-century 
literature when the semantic possibilities of truth are similarly developed.
65
 In Saint 
Erkenwald, however, the word trouthe appears only thre times and its cognate trew 
once. More to the point, the Erkenwald-poet sems to deny the semantic density of truth 
that Grady describes in Langland?s work and that we find in other late-medieval poetry. 
Indeed, in light of works like Piers Plowman and Confesio Amantis that so 
enthusiasticaly demonstrate the multiplicity that Gren and Grady claim for the word, 
the most notable feature of truth in Saint Erkenwald is its semantic stability and 
directnes: truth in Saint Erkenwald always signifies theological truth ? the truth of the 
Word of God. 
 The word truth first occurs in Saint Erkenwald when the Erkenwald-poet 
describes how Saint Augustine ?prechyd .. !e pure faythe and plantyd the trouthe / And 
conuertyd ale !e communnates to Cristendame newe? (13-14). Here, the word clearly 
operates in the theological sense: the ?trouthe? that Augustine plants is the truth of 
                                                
63
 Richard Firth Gren, A Crisis of Truth (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Pres, 199), 3-9.   
64
 Frank Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens in Later Medieval England (New York: Palgrave, 205), 
31; Wiliam Langland, Piers Plowman: The C Version, eds. George Rusel and George Kane (London: 
Athlone Pres, 197), 487 (C.14.212). 
65
 Gower, Confesio Amantis, 1:132 (1.198-19). 
127 
Christianity, the truth of the gospels. The word next appears when the as yet unbaptized 
heathen judge explains to Erkenwald how his body was preserved:  
?Nay bishop,? quo! !at body, ?enbawmyd wos I neuer 
Ne no monnes counsele my clothe has kepyd vnwemyd 
Bot !e riche kynge of reson !at ri!t euer alowes 
And loues al !e lawes lely !at longen to trouthe.? (265-268)
66
 
Here, trouthe is more ambiguously asociated with ideas of right and law. Insofar as it is 
stil linked with God?s Word and His capacity for Christian mercy, however, trouthe in 
this pasage is stil grounded in the theological semantic field, stil asociated with the 
trouthe planted by Augustine. The theological sense of the word is further developed 
when the judge, now saved by Erkenwald?s baptismal tears, tels the bishop that his spirit 
has entered ?into !e cenacle solemply !er soupen ale trew? (336). Particularly when we 
consider the baptismal and eucharistic scene that we have just witnesed ? as wel as the 
de facto Corpus Christi procesion that follows it ? those ?trew? to which the judge 
refers are clearly the christened faithful, the true folowers of Christ.
67
 In fact, only when 
Bishop Erkenwald asks the corpse to speak and to ?councele [conceal] no trouthe? (184) 
about his identity and his past does the word function primarily in an ethical rather than a 
strictly theological sense; but even in this instance, where trouthe sems to pertain to 
human veracity rather than to divine truth (e.g. ?tel the truth!?), the word caries 
theological overtones. For only in the context of his larger, Christian invocation does the 
                                                
66
 ?No Bishop,? said that body, ?I was never embalmed, nor has any man?s counsel kept my clothes 
unblemished except for the rich king of reason that ever alows reason and loves al the laws that belong 
wholy to the truth.? 
67
 Se MED?s definition of ?the true? as ?the faithful? (s.v. ?treu? adj., 6(c). 
128 
Bishop ask the corpse to be truthful: ? ?Be !ou bone to His bode, I bydde in His behalue. 
/ As He was bende on a beme quen He His blode schedde, .. ? (181-182).
68
 
 By arguing that truth caries a relatively limited range of meaning in Saint 
Erkenwald, I contend that the semantic consistency of the word is in keeping with the 
unflagging orthodoxy of the work itself and with its profound investment in salvation. 
The ?trouthe? planted by St. Augustine alows for the proces of conversion we se in the 
poem?s opening lines; the unconcealed ?trouthe? of the judge?s confesion  and God?s 
own love of ?trouthe? lay the foundations for the redemption of the virtuous pagan. 
Ultimately, the poem aserts that the ?trew? are the only souls for whom the great feast of 
heaven is available (340). In John 14:6, Christ tels Thomas, ?ego sum via et veritas et 
vita nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me? [I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man 
cometh to the Father, but by me]. It is this biblical truth, this divine and transcendent 
truth, that forms the core of Saint Erkenwald?s rigid eschatology. And it is to this truth 
that the poem demands the judge submit. Whereas Piers Plowman, Book of the Duches, 
and Confesio Amantis locate in the concept of truth questions that demand to be 
answered; Saint Erkenwald understands truth as the divine answer to al questions. 
 But crucialy, Saint Erkenwald does stil pose a question. It is the same question 
that lies at the heart of the righteous heathen problem itself, one articulated by the judge 
himself: 
?Ma!ty maker of men, thi myghtes are grete ? 
How my!t !i mercy to me amounte any tyme? 
                                                
68
 The bishop?s order that the reanimated heathen ?councele no trouthe? also resonates with contemporary 
treatises on confesion which advise the penitent, as Chaucer?s Parson says, that ?Al mot be seyd, and no 
thing excused ne hyd ne forwraped, and noght avaunte the of thy gode werkes? (X 319). 
129 
Nas I a paynym vnpreste !at neuer thi plite knewe, 
Ne !e mesure of !i mercy ne !i mecul vertue, 
Bot ay a freke faitheles !at faylid !i laghes 
"at euer !ou Lord wos louyd in? ? Allas !e harde stoundes!? (283-288)
69
 
Initialy, the complaint that the judge registers to God is explicitly ? and wrenchingly ? 
personal: How might Your mercy be made sufficient for me? His indignation at being 
left in the ?hele-hole? (291) of limbo despite his evident righteousnes is couched in 
terms that emphasize both God?s absolute authority to grant mercy and his own inability, 
as a virtuous, pre-Christian pagan, to receive it. But the judge soon moves beyond these 
strictly personal questions and widens his rhetorical focus from ?I? to ?we.?
70
 Noting 
that he was damned because ?Adam oure alder .. ete of !at appulle / "at mony a ply!tles 
pepul has poysned for euer? (294-295), the heathen asks, 
Quat wan we wyt oure wele-dede !at wroghtyn ay ri!t, 
Quen we are dampnyd dulfully into !e depe lake 
And exilid fro !at soper so, !at solempne fest 
"er richely hit arne refetyd !at after right hungride? (301-304)
71
 
Speaking now for al those unsaved souls who lived before ?Crist suffride on crosse and 
Cristendome stablyde? (2), the judge proffers his central question: why wasn?t the ?wele-
dede !at wroghtyn ay ri!t? sufficient to engender the mercy of God?  Because, as Grady 
                                                
69
 ?Mighty maker of men, your mercies are great. How might your mercy be made suficient for me at any 
time ? I, an unready pagan, that never knew your plight nor the measure of your mercy nor your powerful 
virtue, but always a faithles man that failed to worship you in the way that you were meant to be 
worshiped? Alas the hard times!? 
70
 Se Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens, 37. 
71
 ?What did we win with our god deds, that always worked for right, when were are dolefuly damned 
into the dep lake and exiled from that super, that solemn feast where those that hungered for right are 
richly rewarded.? 
130 
notes, the judge ?suggests the possibility of a whole cohort left behind at the Harowing,? 
he questions the nature of salvation and the inherent justice of God?s authority.
72
 
Ri!t [right] is an important term here, both in the pasage quoted above and in 
Saint Erkenwald as a whole. In fact, the word right or one of its cognates is used no 
fewer than thirten times over the course of the poem, twelve times by the judge and once 
by Bishop Erkenwald.
73
  These frequent appearances become even more startling when 
we consider that al of them fal within only 100 lines ? approximately one third of the 
poem.  And if such a concentration alone does not make right a keyword in the sense 
suggested by Gren and Wiliams, that concentration nonetheles renders right ?a strong, 
dificult and persuasive word? that that the Erkenwald-poet wishes to interogate. 
Moreover, within the poem itself, the word right acquires ?a considerable range of 
meanings? that are ?complex and potentialy ambiguous.?
74
  Just as the Erkenwald-poet 
consciously underdevelops the semantic potential of truth in order to emphasize the 
poem?s absolutist theology, he similarly overdevelops the word right and to the same 
ends. Right rather than truth is Saint Erkenwald?s keyword. By probing the foundations 
of the word right, the poem articulates the questions that its absolutist understanding of 
truth answers. 
 The nine primary meanings that the MED delineates for the right can be linked 
heuristicaly to the four categories that Gren identifies in his analysis of truth: legal, 
                                                
72
 Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens, 37. 
73
 Se lines 232, 235, 241, 245 (ry!twis), 256, 267, 269, 271, 272, 275, 301, 304, and 32. Of these thirten 
apearances, only one deviates from the range of meanings I wil sugest in the folowing paragraph, the 
judge?s report that ?Ry!t now to soper my soule is sete at !e table? (32). Here, the word functions as an 
intensifier, as described by the MED (s.v. ?right? adj. 8). 
74
 Gren, A Crisis of Truth, 8. 
131 
ethical, intelectual, and theological.
75
 The largest of these semantic groups is the legal 
category, in which right signifies a rule of conduct or law (MED, def. 3). Chaucer?s Tale 
of Melibee ilustrates this sense when Prudence counsels Melibee to ?venge you after the 
order of right; that is to seyn, by the lawe and noght by excese ne by outrage? (VII 
1529). In the legal sense, right can also be a judgment or sentence (4), a duty or 
obligation (7), or a legal claim or entitlement (5 and 6); Chaucer?s monk, for example, 
relates how Darius occupied the throne of Belshazar even though he ?hadde neither right 
ne lawe? (VII 2238). In the second semantic category ? the ethical ? right refers to that 
which is moraly right (1). It also signifies the abstract notions of justice and equity (2) 
and, thus, overlaps somewhat with its legal uses. Chaucer?s judge Apius, presiding over 
a fraudulent case to determine the paternity of Virginius?s daughter, darkly exploits this 
ambiguity when he tels Virginius, ?Thou shalt have al right, and no wrong heere? (VI 
174). The third category of meaning fals within what Gren would cal the intelectual 
semantic field (8).  In Cleannes, Balthazar promises Daniel great reward if he ?redes .. 
by ry!t? ? if he reads correctly ? the words writen by a monstrous hand.
76
 
The fourth category of meaning ? the theological sense of the word ? is the 
category that the MED develops least, a fact that becomes important when we consider 
the uses of the word in Saint Erkenwald. In the theological category, the MED notes only 
that right is an orthographic variant of the modern word rite: ?er ye have youre right of 
hooly chirche, / Ye may repente of wedded mannes lyf, / In which ye seyn ther is no wo 
                                                
75
 I develop these nine senses from MED s.v. ?right? n., 1-8, 10, thus excluding place names, location 
indicators (right as oposed to left), and other miscelaneous uses. I focus here on the word as a noun, but 
the adjectival form of the word adheres to roughly the same senses. Within the text, I have cited 
parentheticaly the aplicable MED entry by number. 
76
 Cleanes, in Andrew and Waldron, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (l.1633). 
132 
ne stryf? (IV1662-64). But even where the overt meaning of the right fals into the legal, 
ethical, or intelectual semantic categories, the word often suggests a broader theological 
meaning. In Pearl, for example, the ghostly maiden tels the Dreamer, ?al is traw!e !at 
He [God] con drese / And He may do no!ynk bot ry!t,? a pairing of terms that suggests 
both right and truth to be firmly within God?s purview.
77
  Similar theological overtones 
are at play in Cursor Mundi, in which God strives to ?Brynge mon into state of ri!t.?
78
 
Here, a ?state of ri!t? sems to refer to both a state of high human morality and a divinely 
imparted state of grace, a near synonym for what Saint Erkenwald signifies with ?trew.?  
In these pasages, right, to be sure, may not function as a denotative synonym for 
theological truth, but the theological connotations of the word, I argue, simer beneath its 
overt legal, ethical, and intelectual meanings. Both as a word and as a concept, right 
implies and even invokes, but is not equal to, theological truth. In this respect, right has a 
markedly diferent relationship to the divine than does truth. We might say that in Saint 
Erkenwald, God?s truth is necesarily and unimpeachably right, but right ? legaly, 
ethicaly, and intelectualy ? is not always God?s truth. 
In its atempt to query the relationship between Christianity and its pre-Christian 
forbears, Saint Erkenwald continues its thematic exploration of right and truth by 
engaging both concepts on a semantic level. As I have demonstrated, the poem quickly 
establishes truth as a theological absolute, a concept aligned strongly with both 
                                                
77
 ?Treuthe, Reste, and Pes,? in Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems, ed. J. Kail, EETS o.s. 124 (London: 
Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr?bner & Co., 1904), 9 (l. 9-10); Pearl, in Andrew and Waldron, The Poems of the 
Pearl Manuscript (l.495-96). 
78
 Cursor Mundi, Part 1, ed. Richard Moris, EETS o.s. 57 (London: Oxford University Pres, 1874), 99 
(Ms. Trinity 1586). 
133 
Augustine and Erkenwald and analogous to the Word of God itself. Saint Erkenwald 
aligns right, however, with the reanimated heathen thereby rendering it a far more fraught 
concept within the poem. The word first appears in the poem when the heathen provides 
an acount of his judicial carer: 
"e folke was felonse and fals and frowarde to reule, 
I hent harmes ful ofte to holde hom to ri!t. 
Bot for wothe ne wele ne wrathe ne drede 
Ne for maystrie ne for mede ne for no monnes aghe, 
I remewit neuer fro !e ri!t by reson myn awen 
For to drese a wrange dome, no day of my lyue. 
Declynet neuer my consciens for couetise on erthe, 
In no gynful iugement no iapes to make 
Were a renke neuer so riche for reuerens sake. 
Ne for no monnes manas ne meschefe ne routhe 
Non gete me fro !e heghe gate to glent out of ri!t, 
Als ferforthe as my faithe confourmyd my hert. (231-242)
79
 
All thre of these uses of right adhere to what I have previously described as the legal 
sense of the word, a reasonable sense for the judge to invoke as he has built his reputation 
on his ability to adhere to the dictates of ?reson? and to a specific legal code. Thus, we 
                                                
79
 ?The folk were felonious and false and froward; I often faced harm to hold them to the right. But for 
neither risk of harm nor wealth nor dread, nor for mastery nor for reward nor for any man?s awe, would I 
ever stray from the right of my own reason. Nor did I ever pronounce a wrong judgment any day of my 
life. I never deviated from y conscience for worldly gain; I never made judgments to gain wealth, no 
mater how rich or revered a man was. Nor did I fail to do the law for any man?s menace or mischief or 
sorow. Always my heart conformed to my faith.? 
134 
can understand ri!t in this pasage to signify law, the law to which the judge atempts to 
hold his people and from which he never deviates.  
The judge?s speech also shows the Erkenwald-poet developing the ethical 
dimension of right. Not only does the heathen adhere to and enforce the law, he also 
holds himself and his community to an ethical and moraly correct standard. I suggest, in 
fact, that the judge conflates the ethical and legal senses of right in these lines. For him 
the law is a moral certainty, an ethicaly derived code for managing a ?felonse and fals 
and frowarde? people. Indeed, it is because of his unswerving adherence to that legal and 
moral certainty ? because the judge was ?ry!twis and reken and redy of !e laghe? (245) 
and ?rewardid euer ri!t? (256) ? that the citizens of New Troy bury him as a king after 
his death. 
When the judge mentions that faith always ?confourmyd [his] hert? (242) to 
adhere to right, he adds theological connotations to the legal and ethical semantic fields 
that dominate in his speech. As his dialogue with bishop Erkenwald continues, the judge 
evokes such theological overtones more emphaticaly. For example, when Erkenwald 
asks if he was embalmed, the judge replies, ?enbawmyd wos I neuer / Ne no monnes 
counsele my clothe has kepyd vnwemyd / Bot !e riche kynge of reson !at ri!t euer 
alowes / And loues al !e lawes lely !at longen to trouthe? (265-268). This explanation, 
which implies that human laws are asociated with [?longen to?] God?s truth, suggests a 
link between right and God, between human law and divine truth. The judge reinforces 
that link by explaining that God granted his miraculous preservation for his adherence to 
right: ?if renkes for ri!t !us me arayed has / He has lant me to last !at loues ry!t best? 
135 
(271-272). In both pasages the judge suggests that his legal righteousnes equates not 
only to a moral or ethical right but also to a fulfilment of divine truth, that the laws he 
enforced in his lifetime were sanctioned by ? even predicated upon ? the very wil of 
God. Just as the poet?s use of right conflated the legal and ethical sense, the judge?s use 
of the word in these pasages conflates legal right with theological truth. In the judge?s 
own formulations, right is law is morality is truth. Even Bishop Erkenwald himself 
sems momentarily to entertain this idea; when he finaly commands the judge to speak 
of his soul ? ?sayes !ou of !i saule? (273) ? he uses the word right for the first and only 
time, apparently mindful of its troubling ambiguity and its ful semantic multiplicity: 
?Quere is ho [your soul] stablid and stadde if !ou so stre!t wroghtes? 
He !at rewardes vche a renke as he has ri!t seruyd 
My!t euel forgo the to gyfe of His grace summe brawnche, 
For as He says in His sothe psalmyde writes: 
?"e skilfulle and !e vnskathely skelton ay to me.?? (274-278)
80
 
As he interogates the reanimated corpse, Erkenwald invokes at once the full range of 
meanings that the poem acords to right. In this context, for a ?renke? to serve right 
sems to indicate that he serves the law, that he follows the moral and ethical dictates of 
his own conscience, and (particularly given Erkenwald?s apparent asumption of the 
heathen?s salvation) that he serves truth itself. Inded, in asking the pagan judge about 
the state of his soul, Erkenwald simultaneously questions the very meanings of right that 
he has just posited. Could right realy mean al that it sems to mean? Is the earthly 
                                                
80
 ?Where is your soul placed and established if you worked so straight? He that rewards each man as he 
has served right must not withold the gift of a certain extension his grace, for as He writes in His true 
psalms: ?the moderate and the harmles come always to me.?? 
136 
pursuit of law and morality tantamount to the pursuit of divine truth? Can it ? does it ? 
merit the same rewards? 
The answer, resoundingly, is ?no?: in the confines of the poem?s soteriological 
straitjacket ? where salvation must be granted by the institutional church and even the 
most virtuous of heathens molder ?dulfuly [in] !e depe lake? ? law is not truth. But the 
semantic dilation of the word right itself ? the implication that right is truth on both a 
linguistic and conceptual level ? makes logical the incredulity of the judge at being left in 
limbo even though he ?after right hungride? (304) throughout his life. The very 
possibility that right could replace truth as a means of salvation underscores the threat 
that the righteous heathen poses to Erkenwald?s eclesiastical authority, a threat that, in 
Chism?s words, ?[aflicts] the bishop with an ambiguous torment? and causes him 
?misgivings about the necesity of his office.?
81
 However, the poem demonstrates ? first 
by expanding the semantic possibilities of the word and then by circumscribing them ? 
that right is a fluid and human construct, a watery reflection of divinely ordained truth. 
This is not to say that right is without its own palpable rewards: just as England?s pre-
Christian inhabitants grant their ?ry!twis? judge a scepter and inter him as a king, so too 
does God ? ?He.. !at loues ry!t best? (272) ? preserve his physical body. But right lacks 
the absolute authority that characterizes truth in the poem. Unlike the ?trouthe? planted 
by Augustine, right alone cannot confer salvation. Right proves to be a kind of half-
measure, perhaps even a half-truth; it is capable of leading to the judge?s corporeal 
preservation but not to spiritual salvation, capable of providing a legal and even moral 
structure for a pre-Christian English society but not the transformative sacramental 
                                                
81
 Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 61-62. 
137 
community that we se in the poem?s closing lines. Significantly, when the heathen 
judge finaly ascends to heaven and sups with the ?trew,? he never once uses the word 
right to describe his soul or his actions.
82
 In moving from damned to saved ? from limbo 
to paradise ? the newly minted Christian learns that the authority of the church and the 
sacraments themselves, those very things that have precipitated his belated salvation, are 
predicated not on right, not on law, not even on justice, but on a divine and explicitly 
Christian truth. 
 
I belabor the semantic implications of right and truth in Saint Erkenwald because the 
opposition that the poem presents between the two terms is indicative of the more overt 
collisions it dramatizes between judge and bishop and between England?s pre-Christian 
past and Christian present. Indeed, one of the poem?s most notable stylistic features is 
the careful series of paralels that it develops betwen Erkenwald and the heathen judge, 
paralels that extend in turn to Erkenwald?s London and the judge?s New Troy. When we 
first encounter Erkenwald in the poem, he is not only the bishop of Augustine?s ?art? but 
the teacher of ?the laghe? in ?London toun? (34), a position adumbrated by the heathen?s 
carer as judge of New Troy. Similarly, both figures are expected to maintain civic order 
within their communities: the judge presides with perfect jurisprudence over a ?felonse 
and fals and frowarde? populace while Erkenwald returns from a progres in Esex to 
quiet the ?troubulle in !e pepul? precipitated by the heathen?s exhumation. These 
thematic correspondences between the two men also find more concrete expresion: the 
judge?s ?riale wedes? (77) hemed with ?glisnande gold? (78) and ?mony a precious 
                                                
82
 The judge does use the word ry!t in pasing, but it is only as an intensifier: ?ry!t now to soper my soule 
is sete at !e table? (32). 
138 
perle? (79) are quietly doubled as Erkenwald walks to the tomb ?riche reuestid? (139) in 
splendid clerical finery; the ?semely septure? (84) that the judge holds in his coffin is 
repeated in Erkenwald?s procesion of ?ma!ti men and macers? (143). This striking 
doubling extends even beyond the confines of the poem. The fictional judge?s ?ferly 
faire toumbe? (45), whose discovery in the foundations of the city?s ?New Werke? 
precipitates the actions of the poem, wil ultimately find its succesor in St. Erkenwald?s 
own shrine, itself located in a place of architectural and spiritual focus in St. Paul?s 
Cathedral.
 83
 In fact, many critics believe that the increased veneration of that shrine in 
the late fourtenth century provided the occasion for the poem?s composition.
84
 
As Saint Erkenwald sets up these overt, even ham-handed, paralels, it also 
frustrates them at critical moments. Given the questions of linguistic eficacy that the 
poem raises, many of those critical moments, not surprisingly, involve the speech acts of 
the two men. We have already examined, in the context of the poem?s imediate 
response to the Lollard threat, the unquestionable eficacy of Erkenwald?s spoken 
utterances. By intoning a command ?in His [God?s] behalue? (181), Erkenwald reinvests 
the preserved heathen with life and compels him to reveal his history; by uttering the 
divinely sanctioned baptismal formula ?and not one grue lenger? (319), the bishop efects 
not only the salvation of reanimated judge but also a miracle tantamount to that of 
transubstantiation. Even the Holy Ghost?s speedy response to Erkenwald?s request for a 
vision alowing him to ?kenne / "e mysterie of !is meruaile !at men opon wondres? 
(124-25) may be sen as evidence that the bishop?s speech is nothing if not productive, 
                                                
83
 The shrine was located not in the physical foundations of the Cathedral but amidst the spitirual 
foundations ? imediately behind the high altar itself. Se Chism, Aliterative Revivals, 49. 
84
 A representative argument is Peterson, ?Introduction,? Saint Erkenwald, 1. 
139 
despite being uttered outside of an explicitly sacramental context. Such powerful 
performative speech acts reflect Erkenwald?s position as a representative of the orthodox 
church. The authority of his words is predicated upon the authority of the Word of God 
and the Christian faith itself; the eficacy of his speech is a linguistic manifestation of his 
relationship to truth. 
By comparison, the speech acts of the pagan judge, a figure whose afinities lie 
with right rather than truth, are marked not by their inherent performativity but by their 
inability to efect the kinds of change brought about by Bishop Erkenwald. For example, 
when we compare the heathen judge?s atempts to bring about civic order to the orderly 
Corpus Christi tableau that concludes the poem, we can se how impotent his uterances 
realy were. In spite of a long carer in which he was never known to ?drese a wrange 
dome? (236), the righteous heathen was unable to control his ?felonse and false and 
frowarde? (231) subjects. According to his own testimony, the citizens of New Troy 
were largely unafected by his unfailingly right ?domes,? responding to them with 
?mede? (234), ?meschefe? (240) and ?manas [menace, threat]? (240).
85
 Unlike Bishop 
Erkenwald, who creates civic order in London with a single prayer, the Judge cannot 
bring about such an ideal society in his own time, even over the course of ?more !en 
fourty wynter[s]? (230) of justly executed verdicts. The judge?s final plea for salvation 
similarly ilustrates such verbal ineficacy. Despite his wel-founded and emotionaly 
persuasive complaint, the heathen cannot speak himself into heaven. Bishop Erkenwald, 
however, delivers the judge from limbo with a baptismal speech act uttered in the 
conditional, a performative that is not even intended to be performative. Such 
                                                
85
 Definitions from Peterson, glosary to Saint Erkenwald, p. 129. 
140 
comparisons reinforce the fact that within Saint Erkenwald, the eficacy of spoken 
language ? the ability to utter a succesful performative ? is defined by the speaker?s 
relationship to the Church, by submision to Christian truth rather than adherence to right 
and law. 
It is, then, their relative relationships to right and truth that separate the judge?s 
unproductive speech acts from the bishop?s eficacious ones. But those speech acts in 
themselves are also emblematic of a larger division within the poem, one that is similarly 
suggested by the poem?s discourse of right and truth ? the division between Old Law and 
New Law, between Mosaic justice and Christian mercy. This point has not gone 
unrecognized by the poem?s earlier readers. Arnold Davidson posits that Saint 
Erkenwald presents competing visions of ?God?s power and God?s justice? and of ?God?s 
mercy, which is proved most by Christ?s crucifixion.?
86
 Other critics aligned the two 
central figures in the poem stil more absolutely with Old and New Law, reading the 
heathen primarily ?as a representative of the Old Law? and Bishop Erkenwald ?as a 
stand-in for Christ, sharing in Christ?s unique priesthood and continuing Christ?s priestly 
ministry in linear time.?
87
  Although Wiliam Kamowski has recently claimed that ?the 
atempt to identify one or another virtue of character with either the Old or New Law 
distracts from the more intricate relationship the poem ilustrates between justice and 
mercy,? the tangible means by which the Erkenwald-poet connects right to the pagan 
judge and truth to Bishop Erkenwald, particularly through the relative eficacy of their 
                                                
86
 Arnold Davidson, ?Mystery, Miracle, and Meaning in Saint Erkenwald,? Papers in Language and 
Literature 16 (1980): 4. 
87
 Lester Faigley, ?Typology and Justice in Saint Erkenwald,? American Benedictine Review 29 (1978): 
386. Also representative of this critical aproach is John Longo, ?The Vision of History in St. Erkenwald,? 
In Geardagum: Essays on Old and Midle English Language and Literature 8 (1987): 35-51. 
141 
respective speech acts, suggests that such a claim is not altogether justified.
88
  Saint 
Erkenwald insists upon the heathen?s identity as a man of law, an archetypal figure 
whose strict adherence to justice consistently overules his sense of mercy, even ?to [his] 
fader, !aghe fele hym be hongyt?(244) ? even if justice meant that his own father would 
be hanged. The poem goes to equal lengths to show Erkenwald, weeping with pity for 
the judge?s tortured soul, as a figure of mercy whose inadvertent baptism both fulfils and 
supersedes the baptismal precepts to which the judge is subject.  
The intricacy that Kamowski locates in the poem?s treatment of right and truth 
resides not in the respective identification of the characters with Old and New Law but in 
the vexed fate of the judge, in his thousand years of suffering and his belated salvation. 
On the one hand, the heathen is subject to the same strict adherence to rote legal dogma 
that he himself displayed in New Troy as a judge of the Old Mosaic Law; his fate, even 
in the time of Christ, is clearly predicated on a heightened idea of justice rather than 
mercy. Erkenwald, too, must submit to the legalistic exigencies of the judge?s 
damnation, and the unflagging necesity of his Christian baptism is predicated on a hard-
line orthodoxy that, in its lack of Christian mercy, is as suggestive of an Old Testament 
ethos as it is of a New Testament one. On the other hand, the fate of the judge is not just; 
rather, it sems to transcend any reasonable ideal of human justice. In this respect, the 
judge?s fate is exemplary of the New Law. Indeed, the mercy of the Christian God ? 
which, as the poem reminds us, is most fully evidenced in the suffering of Christ on the 
cross ? must be understood apart from both justice and right. As unjust as it might sem 
to those asembled in wonder before the sarcophagus ? as unjust as it sems to the tearful 
                                                
88
 Kamowski, ?Inadvertant Baptism,? 9. 
142 
Bishop Erkenwald himself ? the mercy of the Christian God is not subject to justice. It 
functions beyond the justice and morality that informs human law. 
 I have used the term Mosaic to describe the heathen?s Old Law, thus suggesting 
that the heathen judge is, in some sense, a Jew.  Saint Erkenwald is emphaticaly vague 
about England?s pre-Christian faith, aluding to ?"e synagoge of !e Sonne? (21) in the 
same polytheistic breath with which it refers to ?appolyn? (19), ?Mahon? (20), ?Jubiter 
and Jono? (22), and even ?Sathanas? (24); the poem is so self-evidently invested in the 
opposition of right and truth as Old and New Law respectively, however, that it al but 
forces us to consider the relationship between Christianity and its most imediate 
antecedent.  Indeed those references to ?appolyn? and ?Sathanas? that would sem to 
discourage us from identifying the judge as a Jew could also serve to suggest it. R. I. 
Moore discusses the belief, common in medieval Christian thought, that ?a special 
asociation [existed] between the Devil and the Jews? and have detailed the widespread 
belief that Jews were skiled in sorcery and other pagan rites.
89
  Similarly, both Christine 
Chism and Jeremy Cohen note that many medieval Christians believed there to be an 
afinity between Jews and Muslims ?in maters of law and ideology,? a belief that might 
explain the reference to ?Mahoun? in Saint Erkenwald?s acount of Augustine?s 
conversions.
90
  Finaly, simply by rededicating ?"e synagoge of !e Sonne .. to oure 
                                                
89
 R.I. More, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe (Oxford: 
Basil Blackwel, 1987), 35. 
90
 Se Chism, Aliterative Revivals,172-175; quotation from Jeremy Cohen, Living Leters of the Law: 
Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Pres, 199), p. 219-20. 
Conections betwen Jews and Muslims are also detailed in Frederick M. Schweitzer, ?Medieval 
Perceptions of Jews and Judaism,? Jewish-Christian Encounters over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, 
Holocaust, Dialogue, ed. Marvin Pery and Frederick M. Schweitzer (New York: Peter Lang, 194), 136. 
Contemporary evidence for such a conection can be found in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, in which 
a group of Jews frequently invoke ?almyghty Machomet? (l. 149) as they desecrate the sacrament. Se The 
Play of the Sacrament in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis, ETS s.s. 1 (London: 
Oxford University Pres, 1970), 62. 
143 
Lady? (21) and enacting a eucharistic transformation of heathen judge into saved 
Christian, the poem necesarily invokes the theory of supersesion that defined for 
medieval Christians the position of Judaism vis-?-vis Christianity. Thus, in addition to its 
baptismal and eucharistic concerns, Saint Erkenwald also displays a distinctively 
typological strain of thought, a conviction that ?persons, events or institutions of the past 
prefigure and connect with persons, events or institutions of a later period, the second 
encompasing or fulfiling the first.?
91
  In fact, the poem presents us with countles (and 
sometimes anachronistic) layers of typology: Apollo to Adam to ?Mahon? to Christ; 
Temple to Synagogue to Church; Pagan to Jew to Lollard to Christian; Brutus to Hengist 
to Gregory to Augustine; Bretons to Saxons to New Trojans to Londoners; pagan judge to 
Christian bishop. In these typological crenelations of half-imagined history, Saint 
Erkenwald finds some of its most thematicaly fertile ground.  
 Recent scholarship on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in the 
Middle Ages has much to tel us about the pagan judge in Saint Erkenwald and his 
relationship to the Christian tradition that he confronts. This is particularly true of critical 
considerations of Augustine of Hippo?s doctrine of Jewish witnes, a doctrine that was 
stil current in the fourtenth century and that remained important to Christian identity 
wel beyond the Middle Ages. Augustine?s doctrine was a key feature in the 
development of medieval and early modern anti-Judaism: 
Augustine argued that God preserved them [the Jews] for the sake of the 
Church, so that in adhering to the Old Testament they might witnes the 
truth of and historical basis for christological prophesy, and so that they 
                                                
91
 Faigley, ?Typology and Justice,? 384. 
144 
might ultimately acept the implications of this prophesy by converting to 
Christianity at the end of days .. The dispersion and derision of the Jews, 
if insured by the regnant Church, would both aleviate the problem of the 
Jewish encroachments upon Christianity and enhance the value of their 
survival ? by emphasizing the deplorable wretchednes of their eror.
92
 
In many respects, the purpose that Augustine prescribes for the Jews is analogous to the 
purpose that Saint Erkenwald prescribes for the reanimated judge. Consigned by God to 
limbo and, as Peter the Venerable suggests, ?preserved in a life worse than death,? the 
pagan judge has sen the Harowing of Hel and the promise of humankind?s redemption.
 
93
 He recals with vivid detail ?!e blode of [Christ?s] body vpon !e blo rode? (290), and 
he relates to those stil living the unending hunger of damnation. Brought forth from the 
past and set among the living, the ancient judge stands witnes to the miracles of Christ?s 
sacrifice and the truth of Christian doctrine. To the Christians gathered nervously at the 
mouth of the tomb, he also reifies the urgency and necesity of their own faith: his life-in-
death suffering becomes a testament to his adherence to the Old Law; his eventual 
salvation speaks of his aceptance of the New. Cohen might argue that the judge 
embodies ?Christianity?s claim to validity,? a validity that ?hinged on the cesation of the 
ceremonial laws of Moses and their replacement by ? or more precisely, their symbolic 
fulfilment in ? the provisions of the New Testament.?
94
 Whatever the presumed identity 
                                                
92
 Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, NY: Cornel 
University Pres, 1982), 20. Cohen expands his arguments regarding both Augustine?s doctrine of witnes 
and the larger isue of Judaism in medieval Europe in Living Leters of the Law, 23-65. 
93
 Quoted in Schweitzer, ?Medieval Perceptions of Jews and Judaism,? 137. Peter obviously writes these 
words about Jews rather than pagans; they are, nonetheles, alarmingly apropriate to the experience of 
Saint Erkenwald?s judge. 
94
 Cohen, Living Leters of the Law, 378. 
145 
of his shadowy ?paynym? faith, the reanimated judge is, by the standards of Augustinian 
witnes, a virtual Jew.
95
 
 Saint Erkenwald is not alone among Middle English aliterative verse in 
interogating the doctrine of Jewish witnes. Prophetic Jews feature as guardians of 
Jerusalem in The Wars of Alexander, and Langland?s Piers Plowman shows Jews 
functioning as both precursors of Christianity and living testaments to its truth.
96
 Within 
the poems of the so-caled Alliterative Revival, however, questions of Jewish witnes are 
most forcefully considered in the Siege of Jerusalem, a work that considers the fraught 
relationship between Christianity and Judaism through the manifestly brutal lens of Titus 
and Vespasian?s first-century asault on the city. Just as the pagan judge stands witnes 
to the truth of Christian doctrine in Saint Erkenwald, so too do the citizens of Jerusalem 
in Siege stand witnes to the destruction that Christ foretold in the Gospel of Luke: 
Quia venient dies in te: et circumdabunt te inimici tui vallo, et 
circumdabunt te: et coangustabunt te undique ad teram prosternent te: et 
filios tuos, qui in te sunt, et non relinquent in te lapidem super lapidem: eo 
quod non cognoveris tempus visitationis tuae [For the days shal come 
upon thee, and thy enemies shal cast a trench about thee, and compas 
thee round, and straiten thee on every side, and beat thee flat to the 
ground, and thy children who are in thee: and they shal not leave in thee a 
                                                
95
 The phrase ?virtual Jew? is from Sylvia Tomasch, ?Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew,? in The 
Postcolonial Midle Ages, ed. Jefrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martins, 200), 243-260. Tomasch 
refers to the virtual Jew as a concept that ?does not refer to any actual Jew, nor present an acurate 
description of one, nor even a faulty fiction of one; instead it ?surounds? Jews with a ?reality? that displaces 
and suplants their actuality. In fact .. rather than being surprised at having to explain the continuation of 
English reference to Jews after the Expulsion, we might beter acknowledge that Jewish absence is likely 
the best precondition for virtual presence.? (p. 254). 
96
 Se Pasus 7 of Wars of Alexander, 49-58; Langland, Piers Plowman, 568-70 (B.15.582-613). 
146 
stone upon a stone: because thou hast not known the time of thy 
visitation].
97
   
It is this very Christological prophesy that the poem so energeticaly and so horificaly 
enacts, revealing its terible ramifications, both for the city (?no ston in the stede 
stondande alofte, / Morter ne mude-wale bot ale to mulle falen?) and al the more so for 
its inhabitants (?Myght no man stande on the stret for stynke of ded corses. / The peple in 
the pavymeny was pit? to byholde / That were enfamyned and defeted whan hem fode 
wanted?).
98
 As Elisa Narin van Court aptly notes, The Siege of Jerusalem, among other 
late medieval texts, draws upon an Augustinian ?theological formula in which the Jews 
are acorded a role in Christendom: alive, but in servitude; alive, but socialy and 
economicaly degraded; alive, but as symbols of Christ?s Pasion.?
99
 
 If the doctrine of Jewish witnes suggests paralels between Saint Erkenwald?s 
pagan judge and the typologicaly imagined Jew of the Christian Middle Ages, the 
emphasis that the poem itself places on Erkenwald?s succesful performative speech acts 
and the Judge?s unsuccesful ones both confirms and extends these paralels.
100
  We have 
sen how Erkenwald?s highly eficacious speech links the bishop to an explicitly 
Christian ideal of truth and to the institutional Church itself. As a pre-Christian ?lede of 
!e laghe? (200), the judge is similarly linked to a cultural tradition that understood Jews 
to be ?the living leters of biblical law,? repositories of the foundational Mosaic precepts 
                                                
97
 Luke 19:43-44. 
98
 The Siege of Jerusalem, ed. Michael Livingston (Kalamazo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 204), 
82 and 80-81 (l.1289-90, 1246-48). 
99
 Elisa Narin van Court, ?The Siege of Jerusalem and Augustinian Historians: Writing about Jews in 
Fourtenth-Century England,? Chaucer Review 29 (195): 232. 
100
 Kathlen Bidick uses the phrase ?typological imaginary? in order ?to indicate those bundles of 
fantasies that bind Christian-nes to supersesionary notions.? Se Bidick, The Typological Imaginary, 
(Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Pres, 203), 6. 
147 
that Christ?s New Law both fulfiled and superseded.
101
  Like the pagan judge, ?the Jews 
preserve the literal sense, they represent it, and they actualy embody it ? as book bearers, 
librarians, living signposts, and desks, who validate a Christological interpretation of the 
Old Testament.?
102
  Unwavering in his adherence to ?!e ri!t? and ?Enioynyd in gentil 
lawe? (216), the reanimated heathen is himself the Old Law reanimated, both a 
manifestation of it and a slave to its ?literal sense.? And though the invocations of 
Bishop Erkenwald alow him to speak, the judge is finaly identified with the inscribed 
leter rather than the spoken word, an identity that is underscored by the ineficacious 
nature of his spoken utterances. 
 The connection between the pagan judge and the writen word returns us once 
again to the image of the sarcophagus, specificaly to the ?bryht golde letres? (51) that 
embelish its border.  Wolfgang Seiferth notes that Jews in the Middle Ages were 
recognized for ?their knowledge of languages,? and in the minds of many medieval 
Christians, the continued adherence to the precepts of Mosaic law that Jews exhibited 
increasingly bound them to the writen word.
103
 Typical of such thought was Abrogard 
of Lyon, a ninth-century bishop who excoriated the Jews for their supposed belief ?that 
the leters of their alphabet exist eternaly and that .. the law of Moses was writen many 
eons before the world came into being.?
104
 The close asociation of Jews and the writen 
word is also suggested in aliterative poems contemporary with Saint Erkenwald. In the 
                                                
101
 Cohen, Living Leters of the Law, 3. The quotation is Cohen?s paraphrase of prominent theologian 
Bernard of Clairvaux. 
102
 Cohen, Living Leters of the Law, 59.  
103
 Wolfgang Seiferth, Synagogue and Church in the Midle Ages: Two Symbols in Art and Literature, 
trans. Le Chadeanye and Paul Gotwald (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), 46. 
104
 Abrogard of Lyons, De Iudaicis Superstitionibus et Eroribus, quoted in Cohen, Living Leters of the 
Law, 129. 
148 
Wars of Alexander, for example, the prophesies of the Jews are tied directly to their 
writen texts. 
And Iaudus of Ierusalem, !e Iewis [fadir], 
Bringis out a brade buke & to !e berne reches, 
Was plant full of prophasys playnely al ouire, 
Of !e doctrine of Daniel & of his dere sawis. 
"e lord lokis on [a lefe] & [i]n a l[yne] fyndis 
How !e gomes out of Grece suld with !aire grete mi!tis 
"e pupil out of Persye purely distroy; 
And !at he hopis sal be he, & hertly he ioyes.
105
 
In the context of the poem, the prophesy itself ? both in its content and its acuracy ? is 
unsurprising; such prophesies are ubiquitous in Wars and help to propel Alexander?s 
relentles march East. But the prophesy of the Jews is unique in that it is writen in a 
?broad book,? not simply spoken by a prophetic figure. Even in the vast and 
heterogeneously populated world of the Wars of Alexander, Jews are marked by their 
adherence to the writen word. 
 A far more threatening contemporary perspective on Jewish language can be sen 
in Mandevile?s Travels, a text in wide circulation throughout the late Middle Ages. In a 
rather startling exception to his generaly tolerant approach to non-Christian peoples, 
Mandevile describes the Jews who inhabit Gog and Magog as murderous comrades of 
                                                
105
 Wars of Alexander, 56 (l. 176-83). ?Judas of Jerusalem, the Jews? father, brings out a broad bok and 
hands it over to the man [Alexander]. It was ful of plain prophesies al over, of the doctrine of Daniel and 
of his dear sayings. Alexander loks on a leaf and in a line learns how the men from Grece should with 
their great might uterly destroy the people of Persia. And he hopes that he shal be that man, and heartily 
he rejoices? [translation mine]. 
149 
the Antichrist, noting with anxious repetition that the Jews ?conen no langage but only 
hire owne !at noman knoweth but !ei? and that ?!ei conen no maner of langage but 
Ebrew.?
106
 Mandevile hypothesizes that Jews learn their enigmatic language ?in hope 
!at whan the o!er Iewes achull gon out, !at !ei may vnderstonden hire speche & to leden 
hem in to cristendom for to destroye the cristene peple,? a supposition that renders the 
Jews? mysterious alphabet ?a tool of threat and conspiracy against Christians.?
107
   
 The Jews of Gog and Magog ? figures of abject menace ? are not themselves 
recreated in Saint Erkenwald?s fair-minded heathen judge, but ?Mandevile?s ?Ebrew? is 
closely analogous to the writing on that judge?s sarcophagus:  
Bot roynyshe were !e resones !at !er on row stoden. 
Fulle veray were !e vigures !er auisyde hom mony, 
But ale muset hit to mouthe and quat hit mene shulde: 
Mony clerkes in !at clos wyt crownes ful brode 
"er besiet hom a-boute no!t to brynge hom in wordes. (52-56)
108
 
Inscrutable, unpronounceable and incomprehensible, the figures on the casket echo 
Mandevile?s ?Ebrew? as wel as the mystery presented by the corpse himself. But unlike 
that corpse, whose story is ultimately revealed by Erkenwald himself, the words on the 
casket remain untranslated. They are literaly unspeakable, words that can not be brought 
?to mouthe.? The unrest that those radicaly unknowable and unspeakable words foment 
                                                
106
 Mandevile?s Travels, ed. P. Hamelius, EETS o.s. 153 (London: Oxford University Pres, 1919), 177. 
107
 Bidick, The Typological Imaginary, 29. 
108
 ?But the leters that stod there in a row ere runish. Fuly true were the figures that were examined by 
many, but al who pondered them could not speak them or discern what they meant. In that enclosure many 
clerks with broad crowns busied themselves around the words for nought. 
150 
within Erkenwald?s London hints at the more pernicious forms of destruction threatened 
in Mandevile?s acount. 
 In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas posits that ?al the diferences asigned 
between the Old and New Laws? ? between the laws of the Jews and the laws of the 
Christians ? ?are gathered from their relative perfection and imperfection.?: 
Now the end of every law is to make men righteous and virtuous .. and 
consequently the end of the Old Law was the justification of men. The 
Law, however, could not acomplish this; but it foreshadowed it by certain 
ceremonial actions and promised it in words. And in this respect, the New 
Law fulfils the Old by justifying men through the power of Christ?s 
Pasion .. And in this respect, the New Law gives us what the Old Law 
promised.
109
 
In the context of Saint Erkenwald?s typological sensibility, the reanimated heathen judge 
exemplifies this Thomistic vision of the Old Law, of the writen commandments 
ultimately fulfiled and superseded by the New Law of Christ. The relative impotence of 
the Old Law ? its inability to acomplish ?the justification of men? that Aquinas 
describes ? finds an analogue in the judge?s own verbal ineficacy, in his failure to exact 
his salvation or to bring about the harmonious social order in New Troy through 
performative utterance.
110
 It is left for Erkenwald himself, a figure aligned with the New 
Law of Christian truth, to do both of these things. Invested with the authority of Christ?s 
                                                
109
 Thomas Aquinas, Suma Theologica, 2:109, 10 (I-I. q.107 a.1, a2). 
110
 John Hod describes the tension betwen the impotence of Mosaic law and the divinity of its progenitor 
in Thomistic thought, noting that Aquinas understands the law both as ?a mechanism designed to inculcate 
virtue and true religion? even as he understands it to be ?fundamentaly impotent, incapable of producing 
righteousnes.? Se John Hod, Aquinas and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Pres, 
195), 42. 
151 
word the sacramental power his own voice, Erkenwald promises to complete and surpas 
the unfulfiled promise of the heathen.  
 
As both a symbol of Old Law and a half-living revenant from England?s pre-Christian 
past, the exhumed judge fils the Augustinian function of the Jew in the medieval 
Christian imagination, a figure who has both suffered and witnesed, who can atest to the 
truth of the Christian prophesy, and who offers a dire warning against ignoring the true 
Church. That implicit warning is one way in which the typological dimensions of Saint 
Erkenwald circle back around to the more specificaly anti-Lolard tropes that I discussed 
in the first part of this chapter. Indeed, the very premise of Augustine?s doctrine of 
Jewish witnes ? that the Jews? ?biblical tradition offers cogent proof of Christian 
doctrine, enabling the Church to respond efectively to its enemies? ? is no les 
applicable to Saint Erkenwald?s pagan judge than to Jews themselves.
111
 The suffering of 
the pagan judge suggests not only the fate of those, like him, who sadly could not be 
Christians but also (and a fortiori) the fate of those born after Christ who would choose 
not to be Christians. In this way, the poem?s virtuous heathen cum virtual Jew is aligned 
with the fourtenth-century Lollard; the typological discourse of the poem alows us to 
se both Jews and Lollards as taking the same counterproductive position in regard to the 
true Christian faith, as regresing from the spiritual fulfilment promised by the Church.  
 On a fundamental level, however, the connections drawn between Lollards and 
Jews in the later Middle Ages are also grounded in the distinctions I?ve examined above 
between the literal (read ?writen?) word of the Old Testament ? understood to be dead 
                                                
111
 Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, 20. 
152 
and inert ? and the word of the New Testament ? alive, eficacious and transformative, 
spoken and present. Despite their propensity for preaching and for glossing the 
scriptures, Lollards were frequently excoriated for their strict adherence to the literal text 
of the Bible and for their eforts to make it widely available through a program of 
translation. Ruth Nis? discusses how the early fiftenth-century Dominican Thomas 
Palmer ?asociated the Lollard translators, in their insufficient understanding of 
Scripture, with the ?carnal? and stubbornly literal understanding of the Jews and the 
disciples who ?went back? from spirit to flesh.?
112
 Similarly, the virulently anti-Lollard 
bishop Reginald Pecock derided Lolards as ?Bible men? and argued that the very root of 
their heresy was in ?over myche lenyng to scripture, and in such maner wise as it longith 
not to holi scripture for to receyve.?
 113
 More generaly, the emphasis that Lollards 
placed on the primacy of writen scripture suggests the damning adherence to the literal 
sense that also characterized popular medieval conceptions of Jews. The heathen judge?s 
aceptance of the living word of God ? his salvation through the eficacious speech of 
baptism and his recognition of the truth of the Orthodox church ? provides more than just 
proof of his righteousnes; it also provides a pointed rebuke to Lollards and other heretics 
who, unlike the pre-Christian judge, have the ability to acept this truth before their death 
but actively choose to oppose it. 
 Saint Erkenwald?s typological and anti-Lollard discourses, suggested by the 
distinctions between the bishop?s eficacious spoken words and the dead leters on the 
pagan judge?s sarcophagus, finaly coalesce around the central miracle of the poem, the 
                                                
112
 Ruth Nis?, ?Reversing Discipline: The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, Lolard Exegesis, and the Failure 
of Representation,? The Yearbok of Langland Studies 1 (197): 181. 
113
 Quoted in Hudson, Premature Reformation, 28. 
153 
sacrament of the Eucharist itself. The Eucharist frequently found its way into the 
discourse surrounding Jews in the fourtenth and fiftenth centuries, a discourse which, 
as Miri Rubin demonstrates in her exhaustive study of the mater, often asumed a 
decidedly dark cast: Jews on the continent were regularly acused of abusing the 
consecrated host in both mockery and renactment of the Pasion; many more Jews were 
murdered in the wake of such acusations by over-zealous Christians. Even in England, 
where Jews had ben officialy expeled since 1290, stories of Host desecration were 
commonplace, their increasing prevalence highlighting ?a central strand within the 
culture, that which placed the Eucharist at the heart of a system which made the 
supernatural eficacious.?
114
  As Lester Litle states, the ?frontal atacks? launched 
against the Eucharist by Wyclif actualy made such host desecration naratives more 
important to the institutional Church because they both ?permited [Christians] to project 
on to Jews their doubts about transubstantiation? and ?served to bolster popular belief in 
the miracle of transubstantiation.?
115
 Thus, the resurgence of host desecration stories that 
we se in the fourtenth and fiftenth centuries can be at least partialy atributed to a 
cultural perception connecting Lollards and Jews, a perception that was itself reinforced 
by Lollard denials of the eucharistic miracle. 
 Such connections are fully manifest in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, an 
idiosyncratic host desecration drama from the mid-fiftenth century which ends not with 
the death of the Jewish desecrators ? the typical outcome in such naratives ? but with 
                                                
114
 Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale 
University Pres, 199), 39. 
115
 Lester K. Litle, ?The Jews in Christian Europe,? in Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in 
Conflict: From Late Antiquity to the Reformation, ed. Jeremy Cohen (New York: New York University 
Pres, 191), 287-28. 
154 
their conversion. Its ?humane? ending notwithstanding, the play is stil an exceptionaly 
bloody spectacle. Upon purchasing a consecrated wafer from a corrupt Christian, a group 
of Jews led by the wealthy merchant Jonathas renact the pasion upon the host ? first by 
stabbing it, then by nailing it to a pilar, then by plunging it into a cauldron of boiling oil, 
then by baking it in an oven ? in order to determine if it realy is ?God, !at ys full 
mytheti, in a cake.?
116
 At every turn, the host reveals itself to be divine, bleding 
copiously in response to the Jews? abuse and causing Jonathas to ?renneth wood, with !e 
Ost in hys hond.?
117
 In the play?s climactic moments, the oven in which the Jews are 
baking the host begins to ?ryve asunder and blede owt at !e cranys,? and the image of the 
risen Christ appears and speaks to the Jews, finaly engendering their conversion.
118
   
 Because of the Jews? fervent denial of the eucharistic miracle in the Play of the 
Sacrament, a number of critics have suggested that Jonathas and his co-conspirators 
function as stand-ins for Lollards. Cecilia Cutts argues that ?the particular doctrines with 
which the play is so concerned are those to which Wyclif and his folowers objected,? 
namely the sacrament of the altar, and that the play itself might have been writen to 
?[confirm] the people in the Catholic faith? and resist the threatening encroachment of 
Lollardy.
119
 More recently, Ann Eljenholm Nichols has shown the prevalence of 
?Lollard vocabulary to characterize the non-believing Jews? within the play, particularly 
                                                
116
 Play of the Sacrament, 67. 
117
 Play of the Sacrament, 73. 
118
 Play of the Sacrament, 80. 
119
 Cecilia Cuts, ?The Croxton Play: An Anti-Lolard Piece,? Modern Language Quarterly 5 (194): 51. 
Se also Victor I. Scherb, ?Violence and the Social Body in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,? in 
Violence in Drama (Cambridge, Cambridge University Pres, 191), 69-78. 
155 
in the words used to refer to the Eucharist such as ?cake? and ?bread.?
120
 Eamon Duffy 
draws a direct comparison between the bloody spectacle of the Play of the Sacrament and 
the Legend of the Blood of Hailes, in which a chalice boils over with the blood of Christ 
when a Lollard priest enacts a heretical mas over it. Both works, Duffy argues, present 
?an aspect of the Eucharistic reality which was only presented to sin and unbelief, to 
those outside the household of faith? ? to Jews as wel as to Lollards.
121
   
 The point here is not that the Jews in the Play of the Sacrament should be read 
primarily as Lollards; the Jews are clearly meant to represent Jews and are repeatedly 
reinscribed as Jews by the play. However, we should also recognize that the particular 
type of disbelief that the Play of the Sacrament ascribes to its Jews, the denial of the 
Eucharist and of the priest?s ability to engender the miraculous presence of ?God, !at ys 
full mytheti? within the acidents of a wafer, is esentialy identical to the patern of 
disbelief ascribed to Lollards. And if the spectacularly bloody Play of the Sacrament 
sems a strange bedfelow for the ostensibly kinder and gentler Saint Erkenwald, the Play 
of the Sacrament?s strident defense of orthodox eucharistic sacramentalism, its efort to 
absorb non-Christian others into the political and social fabric of a Christian society, and, 
most telingly, its implicit anti-Lollard positions can also be understood as holding a dark 
miror to the aliterative poem. Indeed, a recognition of the similarities between Saint 
Erkenwald and the Play of the Sacrament reveals how those anti-Lollard concerns are 
embedded within medieval understandings of the development of Christianity itself: 
within the model of supersesion that defined Christian identity and history; within 
                                                
120
 An Eljenholm Nichols, ?Lolard Language in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,? Notes and Queries 
36.1 (1989): 23-24. 
121
 Dufy, Striping of the Altars, 104-06. 
156 
archetypal divisions between Old and New Law; and within an Augustinian doctrine of 
witnes. Most crucialy, however, Saint Erkenwald ensures that its anti-Lollard concerns 
are always embedded within the sacrament of the Eucharist itself, within the orthodox 
core of the medieval Church and the living, spoken word that enabled the miracle of 
transubstantiation and Christian salvation. 
 
 
157 
CHAPTER 3 
 
?Seye it ek with good deuocioun?: 
Economies of Spech and Redemption in the Works of Thomas Hoccleve 
 
Thomas Hoccleve?s ?The Story of the Monk Who Clad the Virgin by Singing Ave 
Maria? is a deceptively straightforward miracle of the Virgin. Purportedly writen to 
teach the correct method for reciting Our Lady?s Psalter, the poem focuses on a French 
monk ? the son of ?a ryche man and a worthy? (23) ? who each day says fifty Ave Marias 
in honor of the Virgin Mary.
1
 One day, at the conclusion of his devotions, the Virgin 
appears to the monk wearing a robe without sleves. When the Monk asks the meaning 
of this odd garment, Mary replies that he himself has made the robe for her: his 
incomplete prayers, it turns out, have generated her incomplete clothes. To finish the 
robe, the monk must henceforth recite 150 Ave Marias punctuated after every tenth by a 
Pater Noster. This, the Virgin explains, is the proper way to recite Our Lady?s Psalter. 
The monk dutifully follows the extended regimen, and one week later the Virgin 
reappears, ?freshly araied and wel? (90), in a garment with ful sleves. She thanks the 
monk for his improved devotion and promises to reward him ?in this lyf present, / And in 
!at othir? (97-98): first, he is to be chosen abbot of his monastery where he wil save 
                                                
1
 Al quotations from ?The Story of the Monk who Clad the Virgin by Singing Ave Maria,? as wel as 
quotations from The Series, La Male Regle, and a number of other religious lyrics are from Hocleve, ?My 
Compleinte? and Other Poems, ed. Ellis. They wil henceforth be cited parentheticaly in the text by line 
number and, where necesary, by name without further fotnoting. The poem discused above is titled 
?Item de Beata Virgine? in Ellis?s edition, but I refer to it as ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin? in order to 
avoid confusion with a diferent ?Item de Beata Virgine? printed in Hocleve?s Works: The Minor Poems, 
ed. Frederick J. Furnival and Israel Golancz, EETS e.s. 61 and 73 (London: Oxford University Pres, 
1892 and 1925, reprinted in one volume, 1970). 
158 
many souls by teaching Our Lady?s Psalter; then, at his death, he is to join the Virgin in 
heaven. Hoccleve himself provides a pat moral to the tale, suggesting that devout readers 
should ?serueth our lady .. [who] souffisantly qwytith euery deede? (122-23) by 
scrupulously reciting Our Lady?s Psalter in the manner prescribed by the monk. 
 The sparse critical discourse concerning Hoccleve?s miracle of the Virgin has 
tended to afirm the work as a paean to traditional forms of Christian devotion. Both 
Beverly Boyd and Jerome Mitchel make independent but complementary claims for the 
orthodoxy of Hoccleve?s poem, presenting it as an uncritical redaction of a Marian lyric 
from the Auchinleck manuscript; Mitchel specificaly finds Hoccleve?s religious verse 
?conventional? and locates within it ?the characteristic expresion of piety of the times.?
2
   
More recently, John Bowers has argued that ?the exemplum of a young monk rewarded 
for praying his Latin Pater Noster was implicitly anti-Lollard, since Wyclifites had 
insisted that it was beter to say the prayer ?Our Father? in English without Mary?s 
mediation.?
3
 Such readings may overstate the orthodoxy of the poem and the devotional 
practice it describes. A forerunner of the modern rosary, Our Lady?s Psalter was a 
radical simplification, or more acurately an abbreviation, of the Book of Psalms. Anne 
Winston explains how it may have developed: 
In ?Marian psalters? .. the antiphons that preceded each Psalm and 
announced its theme were replaced by verses that interpreted each of the 
150 Psalms as a reference to Christ or Mary. Gradualy the devotion was 
                                                
2
 Se Boyd, ?Hocleve?s Miracle of the Virgin? and The Midle English Miracles of the Virgin; Jerome 
Mitchel, Thomas Hocleve: A Study in Early Fiftenth-Century English Poetic (Urbana: University of 
Ilinois Pres, 1968). Quotation from Mitchel, Thomas Hocleve, 35. 
3
 John Bowers, Introduction to ?The Ploughman?s Tale,? in The Canterbury Tales: Fiftenth-Century 
Continuations and Additions, ed. John Bowers (Kalamazo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 192), 24. 
159 
shortened to recitation of the antiphons and, in place of the Psalms, either 
Pater Nosters or Ave Marias. Without the Psalms, the connection that the 
antiphons had to a specific theme was lost. As a result, the antiphons 
themselves came to be replaced by rhymed fre paraphrases or simply by 
150 verses in praise of the Virgin.
4
 
Among the most pared down of such devotionals, the prayer regimen advocated by 
Hoccleve?s monk would have adhered to the religious orthodoxy cited by Bowers; it 
would have prempted lay engagement with the scriptures and reinforced through 
repetition the central role of Mary as mediator. Indeed, the rosary itself, of which Our 
Lady?s Psalter was an important precursor, was eventualy approved by Rome as a way 
?to reinforce orthodoxy and to combat heresy.?
5
 But the development of Our Lady?s 
Psalter had connections beyond reinforcing orthodoxy; it ?shaped, and was shaped by, the 
demands of the laity for new, more individual and private forms of religious 
observance.?
6
 These same demands were themselves instrumental to the spread of 
Lollardy in fourtenth-century England, and they helped precipitate other forms of 
heterodox devotion across the European continent. 
Thus, even if Our Lady?s Psalter does hew to the orthodox church in many 
respects, Hoccleve?s alusion to the devotional practice is more complex in its 
signification than most earlier critical opinions alowed. In this respect, Ethan Knapp?s 
somewhat more nuanced reading maintains that ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin? is 
esentialy orthodox in substance but also presents a ?self-reflexive arangement? 
                                                
4
 Ane Winston, ?Tracing the Origins of the Rosary: German Vernacular Texts,? Speculum 68 (193): 621. 
5
 Winston, ?Origins of the Rosary,? 634. 
6
 Winston, ?Origins of the Rosary,? 619. 
160 
between monk and Virgin that pushes the poem ?beyond most orthodox meditative 
exercises in its suggestion that the deeds of a man like the monk might have a concrete 
significance in the reality of the Virgin?s life.? He also observes that Hoccleve?s 
depiction of the Virgin as mediatrix resonates with the poet?s secular and topical verse, in 
which ?the isue of intercesion, financial rather than spiritual, is a constant motif.?
7
 
Like the rest of Hoccleve?s devotional work, ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin? 
has been consistently overlooked by critical investigations in favor of La Male Regle, The 
Regement of Princes, and the five linked poems known as The Series ? Hoccleve?s 
putatively ?autobiographical? works.
8
  As a result, our understanding of Hoccleve?s 
corpus has been dominated by readings of only a few poems; critics have either bracketed 
the religious lyrics from the autobiographical ones or, more often, ignored them 
altogether. In this chapter, I wil sek to rectify that critical imbalance by looking closely 
at a number of the devotional lyrics, starting with ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin.? 
More specificaly, I wil demonstrate that the relationship between supplicant and 
intercesor suggested in that work finds expresion in several of Hoccleve?s Marian 
poems, and that those poems in turn help define similar paterns of reciprocity in the 
poet?s autobiographical works and in his dealings with the Lancastrian dynasty. The first 
part of this chapter redefines what Knapp cals a ?self-reflexive arangement? in 
                                                
7
 Knap, The Bureaucratic Muse, 153-154. 
8
 There are surprisingly few exceptions to this statement. Eva Thornley argues that Hocleve?s secular 
complaints, especialy La Male Regle, are in themselves derivative of the penitential lyric, a point discused 
at some length by John Burow. Se Eva M. Thornley, ?The Midle English Penitential Lyric and 
Hocleve?s Autobiographical Poetry,? Neuphilologische Miteilungen 68 (1967): 295-321 and John A. 
Burow, ?Autobiographical Poetry in the Midle Ages: The Case of Thomas Hocleve,? Procedings of the 
British Academy 68 (1982): 389-412. Jenifer Bryan also ses elements of devotional literature in 
Hocleve?s secular complaints as wel as elements of the complaint in Hocleve?s overtly devotional 
literature in ?Hocleve, the Virgin, and the Politics of Complaint,? PMLA 17.5 (202): 172-87. Knap 
discuses many of Hocleve?s devotional works in chapter 5 of The Bureaucratic Muse, 129-157. 
161 
Hoccleve?s religious verse as a specific economy of speech, a dynamic of exchange in 
which supplicant and intercesor are locked in a mutualy dependent relationship 
predicated on the causative potential of the spoken prayer.
9
 Turning my atention to 
Hoccleve?s Series, I wil then argue that the economic paradigms of speech Hoccleve 
develops in his devotional lyrics are critical to defining both the ?wilde infirmite? (Series 
1.40) that he describes in the ?Complaint? and the path to recovery, both social and 
psychological, that he suggests throughout the linked poems. In these ways I wil 
demonstrate that Hoccleve?s entire oeuvre ? both the devotional and autobiographical 
works ? maintains a discursive integrity that has not yet been recognized, a common 
vision of verbal exchange that transcends the claustrophobic idiosyncrasies of Hoccleve?s 
private turmoil and gestures toward the often public work ascribed to the spoken word 
within the mingled economic and political systems of the early fiftenth century. 
 
Spoken Prayer, Philanthropic Giving, and Our Lady of Economic Increase 
Ethan Knapp ses Hoccleve?s devotional lyrics as betraying ?a fundamental 
anxiety about the reliability of Mary as an intercesor .. most often represented through 
invocations of memory.? He further aserts that Hoccleve?s ?Monk Who Clad the 
Virgin? is ?founded on an act of memory, as the monk (like Chaucer?s clergeon) must 
learn the proper way to sing the Ave Maria.? That this learning takes place through 
                                                
9
 Knap, The Bureaucratic Muse, 153. The phrase ?economy of spech,? which I wil use throughout this 
chapter, is reminiscent of the phrase ?verbal economy,? a concept developed by Piere Bourdieu and 
recently aplied to Hocleve?s Regement of Princes by Nicholas Perkins. Perkins describes the ?verbal 
economy? as a system ?in which the value of spech, and inded silence, fluctuated acording to the status 
of the speaker and the atitude of the listener? (p. 5), a system that he examines in an efort to understand 
Hocleve?s major work as ?public poetry.? Se Nicholas Perkins, Hocleve?s Regiment of Princes: 
Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 201); Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 
especialy p. 43-65. 
162 
repetition is significant in light of medieval models of memory, which would have 
understood the recitation of 150 Ave Marias as part of a proces by which the monk 
inscribed a set of mental images into his mind.
10
 In addition to this obsesion with the 
function of memory, Knapp perceives in the work ?the presence of a peculiarly self-
reflexive spirituality .. in which the agency of the intercesor and supplicant are 
curiously mixed,? a dynamic in which the Virgin wil show her favor to the monk as long 
as the monk remembers the Virgin and vice versa.
11
 Both of these thematic impulses ? 
memory and self-reflexivity ? coalesce in the poem around the Ave Maria. Clearly, the 
monk?s recitation of the Ave Maria is itself an act of Marian remembrance; the prayer not 
only does ?worship and honour? (34) to the Virgin, it alows him to impres upon his 
own mind the ?mental imaging.. [that] is a feature of trained recollection.?
12
 In this 
respect, we might even understand the Virgin?s appearance to be the manifestation of the 
monk?s own memory ? the incarnation of his own mental picture, itself created through 
the discipline of repetitive prayer. But beyond its mnemonic function, the spoken 
devotional is also at the center of the circular relationship between the monk and Mary, 
one in which the monk?s devotional performance demonstrably afects the Virgin?s 
physical condition just as the Virgin?s mediation demonstrably afects the monk?s 
heavenly and earthly circumstances. By insisting upon such an interdependent 
relationship, the poem asks us to consider not only the monk?s status absent the 
intercesion of the Virgin but also the Virgin?s status absent the intercesion of the monk: 
                                                
10
 Se Knap, The Bureaucratic Muse, 148. Knap himself draws from Mary Caruthers, The Book of 
Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 190). For a 
discusion of Memory as the creation of mental phantasms, se Caruthers, Book of Memory, 47-60. 
11
 Knap, The Bureaucratic Muse, 147-48, 153. 
12
 Caruthers, The Book of Memory, 59. 
163 
would Mary be dresed in rags without the initial fifty Ave Marias uttered by the monk, 
or would she be humiliatingly naked; would she even exist as spiritual intercesor 
without his spoken homage? Knapp posits that ?The Monk who Clad the Virgin? finaly 
questions the very nature of Marian intercesion itself by showing the Virgin?s identity to 
be predicated upon the ?supplemental action of worshippers.?
13
   
The ?supplemental action? performed by those worshippers is more than simply a 
mnemonic; it is, I contend, expresly and fundamentaly the action of speaking. On this 
point the poem is emphatic: the Virgin demands not only that specific prayers be recited 
but that they be recited in a specific patern and in specific numbers. Moreover, the poem 
ties the physical recitation of the prayers inextricably to the creation of the Virgin?s 
garment; as Mary tels the monk, ?This clothynge / Thow has me youen, for thow euery 
day / L [50] sythe Aue Maria seyying, / Honoured hast me? (57-60). The dependency of 
garment upon word here strongly suggests that the spoken prayers of the monk ? not 
solely his memory ? are responsible for the clothes of the Virgin. And even if the monk?s 
performance of Our Lady?s Psalter does not create the Virgin?s clothing out of whole 
cloth, it at least acts as a catalyst for such a creation. In this respect, the uttered Ave 
Marias of Hoccleve?s ?Monk Who Clad the Virgin? asume the properties of overtly 
performative speech acts. Like the sacramental utterances that permeate Saint Erkenwald 
and like Phoebus?s punitive outbursts in the Manciple?s Tale, the monk?s spoken prayers 
perform demonstrable work on the world around them. 
We might argue that the monk?s performative prayers serve the same purpose as 
Bishop Erkenwald?s baptismal and eucharistic utterances, namely that they provide 
                                                
13
 Knap, The Bureaucratic Muse, p. 154. 
164 
implicit support to the orthodox church by simultaneously demonstrating the authority of 
an ordained eclesiast and evoking a nexus of anti-Lollard asociations. Such a reading 
would shore up the critical consensus that ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin? exemplifies 
orthodox devotion and add to claims, often based upon Hoccleve?s public rebuke of 
Lollardy in the ?Addres to Sir John Oldcastle,? that Hoccleve was himself a strident 
anti-Wyclifite crusader.
14
 Rather than focusing on the poem?s orthodoxy, however, I 
would like to examine the place of the Ave Maria in the economy of exchange that 
Hoccleve develops between the Virgin and the monk, an economy that strongly recals 
the philanthropic practices of wel-heeled English families in the later Middle Ages. Joel 
Rosenthal describes such philanthropy as being particularly pervasive among (but not 
limited to) the nobility during the fourtenth and fiftenth centuries: individuals and 
families of means ?were expected to give to the church and to the poor .. both to justify 
their inequitable status in the social hierarchy and to buy prayers for their own souls.?
15
  
In ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin, Hoccleve specificaly identifies the monk as the son 
of ?a ryche man and a worthy? (23), marking him as ? if not necesarily a member of the 
nobility ? an individual with the means to participate in charitable practices. 
Furthermore, the poem stipulates that the central exchange between Mary and the monk 
takes place not within the abbey but in a devotional chapel on the monk?s family estate, a 
locus appropriate to the self-interested philanthropy of the upper-clases. While such 
                                                
14
 Thomas Hocleve, ?Adres to Sir John Oldcastle,? in Furnival and Golancz, Hocleve?s Works: The 
Minor Poems, 8-24. For analysis of the poem as an anti-Wyclifite work, se Richard Firth Gren, Poets 
and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Midle Ages (Toronto: University of 
Toronto Pres, 1980), 183-86; Charity Scot Stokes, ?Sir John Oldcastle, The Ofice of the Privy Seal, and 
Thomas Hocleve?s Remonstrance Against Oldcastle of 1415,? Anglia: Zeitschrift f?r Englische Philologie 
18 (200): 56-570. 
15
 Joel T. Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise: Gift Giving and the Aristocracy, 1307-1485 (London: 
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 8. Also se Jeny Kermode, Medieval Merchants: York, Beverly and 
Hul in the Later Midle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 198), 145-150. 
165 
details alone may not go so far as to render Mary the object of the monk?s noblese 
oblige, they nonetheles lay the groundwork for a model of Marian devotion predicated 
upon structures of charitable giving by the landed and the afluent, structures that 
themselves suggest a feudaly inflected, verticaly aligned hierarchy of exchange. 
It follows that the language of the philanthropic gift is precisely the language 
Mary uses to describe her two exchanges with the monk. When she first appears in her 
sleveles garment the Virgin tels him, ?This clothynge / Thow has me youen? (57-58); 
later, when the monk has completed his longer set of prayers, she says ?Beholde now / 
How good clothing and how fresh apparaile / That this wyke to me youen hast thow? 
(92-94). But the ?fresh apparaile? is not given for nothing. In short order the Virgin 
reveals how she wil ?qwit? (97) the monk?s generosity: ?And soone aftir, abbot of !at 
abbeye / He mad was, as !at tolde him our lady. / .. his soule was betaght / To God. 
He heuene had vnto his meede? (115-16, 120-21). Like the monk?s afluence and the 
poem?s seigneurial seting, this quid-pro-quo arangement conforms to expectations of 
late medieval philanthropic giving, a practice that ?was primarily aimed at the spiritual 
welfare of the donor rather than at improving the worldly condition of the recipient.?
16
  
Indeed, such an economic model ? in which personal, spiritual reward is implicit in the 
act of giving ? helps to explain the unusual, even paradoxical, degre of reciprocity that 
marks Mary?s relationship with the monk. Conforming to the hierarchic structure of 
philanthropy, in which the donor was always of a higher social station than the recipient, 
as wel as to traditional structures of Marian devotion, in which the devote was but a 
                                                
16
 Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise, 130. 
166 
beggar before the ?queene of heuene? (78), Hoccleve ?s monk both gives to and humbles 
himself before a Virgin marked at once by need and by noblese. 
The institution of philanthropy among England?s upper clases was deeply rooted 
in the strict hierarchy and gross economic inequities of the feudal system, and in many 
respects it was dependent upon those very inequities for its preservation. Arguably, the 
philanthropic gift functioned les to improve the lot of its recipient than it did ?to 
contribute to the afirmation of the lord [of a household] and his establishment? and to 
reify the seigneurial relationships that necesitated it in the first place.
17
 As a result, we 
might be tempted to se the philanthropy of the upper clases as an esentialy 
conservative economic practice, one that not only provided spiritual succor for donors in 
the form of prayers, chantries, and other such soteriological considerations but also 
enhanced ?the social status of the givers? while ?apply[ing] social control by the 
benefactor upon the beneficiaries.?
18
 But the precepts of philanthropic giving also 
simered just beneath the surface of England?s burgeoning money economy in the later 
Middle Ages; therefore, they must be understood not merely as a vestige of the fast-
decaying feudal system but also as ?part of a larger exchange, that of services and 
obligations in return for money and goods, which we recognize as the specialization of 
labor.?
19
 In point of fact, the institutionalized giving of gifts (or at least the pretense of 
such giving) often stood in for the regular payment of wages, and it facilitated the 
beginnings of modern practices of lending and borowing. The gift even provided cover 
                                                
17
 Felicity Heal, ?Reciprocity and Exchange in the Late Medieval Household,? Bodies and Disciplines: 
Intersections of Literature and History in Fiftenth-Century England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David 
Walace (Mineapolis: University of Minesota Pres, 196), 180. 
18
 Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise, 129-30. 
19
 Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise, 10. 
167 
for the de facto charging of exorbitant interest, a practice that would otherwise have been 
considered usury.
20
 Thus, even as philanthropic giving outwardly reinforced the vertical 
hierarchies of exchange that had prevailed in England for centuries, it simultaneously 
enabled horizontaly aligned (and sometimes suspect) market transactions that, by the 
later Middle Ages, were radicaly dismantling such hierarchies. 
The necesary but awkward overlap of philanthropy and wage capitalism was by 
no means irelevant to Hoccleve?s experience as clerk of the Privy Seal. A. L. Brown 
documents a semingly regresive shift in the remuneration of the Privy Seal clerks 
during Hoccleve?s tenure, a shift that saw the payment of daily wages replaced by the 
awarding of gift-like annuities.
 21
 Such a change meant that by 1399, the entire 
remunerative system for the Privy Seal clerks ?was theoreticaly grounded on the 
independent largese of the king? and was supplemented only occasionaly by 
miscelaneous grants, bequests, and tips from other patrons.
22
 Because of his long years 
of employment at the Privy Seal (c. 1387 - c. 1424), Hoccleve would no doubt have been 
intimately familiar with this change in remuneration as wel as with the Janus-like 
countenance that the philanthropic gift more generaly asumed.
23
 
In ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,? Hoccleve develops the tension between the 
seigneurial (read verticaly aligned) and mercantile (read horizontaly aligned) structures 
                                                
20
 Se Diana Wod, Medieval Economic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 202), 185-88. 
21
 A.L. Brown, ?The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fiftenth Century,? The Study of Medieval Records, ed. 
D.A. Bulough and R. L. Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Pres, 1971), 26-68. Hocleve himself discuses the 
inherent problems of this system, with particular regard to the practice of tiping, in his prologue to The 
Regement of Princes (l. 149-53). Se Hocleve?s Works, II: The Regement of Princes and Fourten of 
Hocleve?s Minor Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnival, EETS e.s. 72 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr?bner: 
1897), 5-56. 
22
 Ethan Knap, ?Bureaucratic Identity and the Construction of the Self in Hocleve?s Formulary and La 
Male Regle,? Speculum 74 (199): 365. 
23
 For a brief chronology of Hocleve?s years at the Privy Seal se Furnival?s introduction to Hocleve?s 
Works: The Minor Poems, vi-xvi. 
168 
of exchange through the persistent use of economic language. At moments, this language 
resonates with the social and economic formations that we asociate with feudalism, for 
example, when Hoccleve describes the monk?s dutiful ?worship and honour / Of Goddes 
modir? (34-35), when he notes that the monk?s prayers were uttered in a devotional 
chapel ?mad and edified .. at our ladyes reurerence? (43-44), or when he proposes that 
in order to stay in the Virgin?s good graces we must perform ?seruice, honour and 
plesance? (20). At other times, the language displays a shift toward a more mercantile 
sensibility, as when Hoccleve writes ?Betwixt God and man is [Mary] mediatrice / For 
our offenses mercy to purchace? (8-9). Most frequently, however, the economic 
terminology that Hoccleve employs evokes both the feudal and the mercantile at once, an 
indication that by the fiftenth century the linguistic registers defining these two systems 
? and, indeed, the two systems themselves ? were so thoroughly intermingled as to be 
mutualy inextricable. As an example, we might consider Hoccleve?s use of the word 
?mede? (121) to describe the reward Mary wil provide for the monk?s spoken 
devotionals. Certainly ?med? can suggest the vertical systems of exchange that define 
the feudal economic hierarchy: in the popular fiftenth-century Romance of Guy of 
Warwick, a text roughly contemporary with Hoccleve?s ?Monk who Clad the Virgin,? Sir 
Roholde is described as an Earl ?who helde Warwick in hys honde? and who ?gave 
gyftys and grete medys? to his grateful vileins.
24
 In Piers Plowman, however, Langland 
personifies ?med? as a figure of abject duplicity, capable of co-opting the appurtenances 
of a feudal economic hierarchy (?Seruaunt! for hire servyce, we se! wel !e so!e, / 
Taken Mede of hire maistres as !ei mowe acorde?) even as she enables the most 
                                                
24
 The Romance of Guy of Warwick: The Second or 15th-Century Version, ed. Julius Zupitza, EETS e.s. 25-
6 (London: Tr?bner & Co., 1875), 1, 2 (l. 28, 40). 
169 
fundamental aspects of mercantile exchange (?Mede and Marchaundi!e mote nede go 
togideres; / No wi!t, as I wene, wi!outen Mede may libbe?).
25
   
In ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,? the word ?quit,? like the word ?mede,? 
occupies an ambiguous position between the poem?s vertical and horizontal structures of 
exchange. In the poem?s authorial moralitas, Hoccleve invokes the sworn bonds of fealty 
implicit in the practice of Christian worship when he writes, ?Who serueth our lady, 
lesith right naght. / Shee souffisantly qwytith euery deede? (122-23). Despite this 
seigneurial context, however, the term ?quit? itself, which also appears when the Virgin 
promises to ?qwit? (97) the monk for his labor, necesarily recals the fre-wheeling, 
hierarchy-violating economic structure that organizes Chaucer?s Canterbury Tales.
26
  
While Hoccleve?s moralitas may imply that the spiritual quitings of ?The Monk Who 
Clad the Virgin? are more staid than those of Chaucer?s capitalist hurly-burly, we can 
also se in those quitings echoes of the Summoner promising to ?quiten [the Friar] every 
grot? (II 1292), the ?false chanon? asking a priest ?Lene me a marc .. / And at my day I 
wol it quiten thee? (VII 1026-27), or even Palamon and Arcite, locked in a tower where 
?ther may no gold hem quite? (I 1032). The Virgin?s sufficient ?quiting,? embodies both 
of these exchange models. 
The mechanics of the final transaction between the monk and the Virgin 
underscore and extend these complexities. Indeed, despite Hoccleve?s clear insistence on 
                                                
25
 Langland, Piers Plowman, 283, 284 (B.3.217-18, 226-7). 
26
 I base the phrase ?economic structure? on similar language in R. A. Shoaf?s Dante, Chaucer, and the 
Curency of the Word: Money, Images and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, OK; Pilgrim 
Boks, 1983), especialy p. 163-72. Shoaf argues that ?Chaucer posits economics, ?quiting,? as the 
structure of relations in The Canterbury Tales? (168) and that ?economics, or ?quiting,? structures the 
relations betwen tales? (169).  
170 
maintaining the language and ethos of seigneurial hierarchy in this pasage, a number of 
fundamentaly capitalist elements stil lurk behind the exchange itself: 
And euery day Aue Maria he [the monk] 
Seide aftir hir doctryne and enformynge. 
And, the nexte haliday aftir suynge, 
Our lady freshly araied and wel 
To the monk cam, beynge in !at chapel, 
 
And vnto him seide, ?Beholde now 
How good clothyng and how fresh apparaile 
That this wyke to me youen hast thow. 
Sleues to me clothynge now nat faile, 
Thee thanke I, and ful wel for thy trauaile 
Shalt thow be qwit heer, in this lyf present, 
And in !at othir whan thow hens art went. (87-98) 
The gift the monk gives and the gift the Virgin receives are not the same: specificaly, the 
monk offers a regimen of spoken prayers while Mary gets from him ?good clothyng and 
fresh apparaile? (93). This disjuncture speaks to the performative eficacy of the 
monk?s speech by positing a direct and causal relationship between word and garment. 
In the same breath, it also suggests the potential economic function of such performative 
speech and its value in a system of mercantile exchange. In this respect, the monk?s 
spoken prayers become a kind of linguistic currency: they are the means by which Mary 
gets her garment but not the garment itself, valuable for what they do rather than what 
171 
they are. We se a similar disjuncture when Mary promises to ?qwit? the monk for his 
?trauaile? (96) rather than for the garment she claims to have been given. Indeed, the 
very notion of the Virgin repaying the monk for his ad hoc work is far more reminiscent 
of a market economy based on contracts and specialized labor than it is of a seigneurial 
economy based on fealty and institutionalized noblese oblige, particularly when we 
consider that Mary herself requested (would it be too tendentious to say ?contracted??) 
the additional prayers. 
Finaly, and perhaps most startlingly, we se in this pasage a constant emphasis 
on increase throughout the exchange: the monk?s recitation of Our Lady?s Psalter 
provides good clothing for the virgin, and in return the Virgin instals the monk as abbot 
of his order and asures him of ?eternel blise? (111). Later, as the Virgin stipulates, the 
monk teaches his ?couent .. to seye / My psalter as byforn taght haue I thee? (101-02), 
and together they in turn teach it to ?the peple .. in generalte? (103). Because of al of 
this work, the Virgin announces finaly, ?shal ther be many oon / Saued? (110-11). The 
exponential degre of increase that the poem imagines ? in both souls saved and prayers 
spoken ? is not unusual in naratives of spiritual redemption (itself a term with strong 
economic valences); we might even argue that chain-reaction of salvations triggered by 
Hoccleve?s monk follows the same patern as St. Cecilia?s conversions in the Second 
Nun?s Tale or, just as appropriately, the secular and economicaly grounded flood of 
forgivenes that concludes the Franklin?s Tale. But in a poem where spoken prayers 
become currency and where contracted ?trauaile? is ?qwit? with not just spiritual but 
temporal reward, such eschatological increase begins to smack uncomfortably of 
economic increase, even of compounding interest.  Indeed, we might understand the 
172 
terms of the Virgin?s arangement with the monk ? the monk teaches Our Lady?s Psalter 
to his felow monks, who in turn teach it to the members of local community, who in turn 
teach it to others, and so on ? as amounting to a salvific pyramid-scheme, one that recals 
the dubious financial exchanges of the Shipman?s Tale or the devious ?multiplicacioun? 
(VII 849) of the Canon?s Yeoman?s Tale as readily as it recals the Second Nun?s 
conversionary multiplication.
27
 
Foucault?s observation, ?When goods can circulate (and this thanks to money), 
they multiply, and wealth increases,? is instructive here; so, too, is its corollary, ?when 
coinage becomes more plentiful, as a result of good circulation and favorable balance, 
one can atract fresh merchandise.?
28
 Both of these statements speak to the exponential 
increase that the Virgin?s instructions to the monk engender. As it pertains to Christian 
redemption, such increase clearly would have been understood as a net positive by 
Hoccleve?s readers. The economic model that Hocleve proposes for such eschatological 
increase, however, is more ambiguous in its moral implications because it echoes a 
number of the abuses that prevailed in the developing marketplace of the fiftenth 
century. Chief among these abuses was, of course, the sin of usury, which Wiliam of 
Auxere defines as ?the wil to acquire something above the principal of a loan? and 
which John Gower, more colloquialy, recognizes as the action of a man who ?wol 
ageinward take a bene, / Ther he hath lent the smale pese.?
29
 The discourse surrounding 
                                                
27
 For a related argument se Robert Adams, ?The Concept of Debt in The Shipman?s Tale,? Studies in the 
Age of Chaucer 6 (1984): 85-102. 
28
 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, ed. R. D. Laing (New 
York: Vintage Boks, 1973), 178. 
29
 Wiliam of Auxere quoted in Od Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schols (New York: E. J. 
Bril, 192), 7; Gower, Confesio Amantis, vol. 3, ed. Rusel Peck (Kalamazo: Medieval Institute 
Publications, 204), 3:132 (5.408-09). 
173 
usury is complex and often self contradictory, and I don?t want state outright that 
Hoccleve?s monk and Virgin are engaged in usurious practices. But the economic model 
of increase upon which their salvific program is based sems dangerously close to the 
more unethical exigencies of a mercantile system of exchange. Even if the Virgin is not 
an outright usurer, we can se that the seigneurial language deployed by Hoccleve?s 
poem is the same language by which annuities were able to stand in for the salaries of the 
Privy Seal clerks, the same language by which the giving of ?gifts? facilitated usurious 
lending without the appearance of excesive interest. The economic language of 
Hoccleve?s poem is the self-same language that served both to elide and to alow for the 
more dubious practices of market capitalism in the later Middle Ages. 
 
Because economic language has a long history in the Marian lyric and in Christian 
devotional writing more generaly, Hoccleve is not alone in describing salvation in terms 
of compounded interest. His inimitable contemporary, Margery Kempe, relates a vision 
in which Christ describes salvation in similar terms of economic increase: ?Dowtyr, I 
schal be a trew executor to the and fulfyllyn al thi wylle, and for thi gret charyt? that 
thow hast to comfortyn thin even cristen thu schalt have dubbyl reward in hevyn.?
30
 But 
even if, as one scholar notes, ?the intersection of religious and economic themes and 
tropes .. was a recognized commonplace in medieval discourses of redemption,? the 
uneasy tension that ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin? develops between feudal and 
mercantile structures of exchange is uniquely Hoccleve?s own, that of a lifetime 
bureaucrat caught up in ?the long and uneven transition from household government to 
                                                
30
 Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lyn Staley (Kalamazo, MI: Medieval Institute 
Publications, 196), l. 471-73. Available at < htp:/ww.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/kemp1frm.htm>. 
174 
salaried administration.?
31
 At the center of this economic tension stands the Ave Maria 
itself, a prayer that becomes important as a charitable donation to the virgin and as an 
investment in the monk?s soul, as the exercise of sacral fealty and as the completion of a 
contracted remembrance, as med in return for devotion and as interest paid on a 
soteriological debt. But we must not forget that the prayer is first a distinct and specific 
spoken utterance, one that atains these layers of importance only by virtue of its unique 
ability to function meaningfuly in both the spiritual manor house and the spiritual 
marketplace. Moving within the mingled economies of Hoccleve?s devotional lyric ? 
across strict vertical hierarchies reminiscent of the feudal system and increasingly lateral 
social arangements like those that proliferated in the late-fourtenth and fiftenth 
centuries ? the Ave Maria becomes a speech act whose importance is predicated on its 
ability to circulate and to perform work: to serve as a charitable gift, to engender a 
garment, to provide remembrance, to secure a position in a religious order, to purchase 
mercy, to redeem a single soul, to save a whole comunity. Be it as commodity or as 
currency, the Ave Maria is central to the spiritual economy of Hoccleve?s poem because 
it is bought and traded, because it engenders increase. Such eficaciousnes ? such 
performativity ? is what makes the Ave Maria so valuable a coin. 
My argument about spoken prayer and economic exchange, namely that prayer 
functions as a kind of currency in the spiritual economy of Hoccleve?s poem, has been 
anticipated by both structuralist and post-structuralist critics, specificaly by Saussure and 
later by Derida and Foucault. Saussure draws a direct paralel between the coin and the 
spoken word, one predicated on the idea that each has value because each ?can be 
                                                
31
 Theresa Coleti, ?Paupertas Est Donum Dei: Hagiography, Lay Religion, and the Economics of 
Salvation in the Digby Mary Magdalene,? Speculum 76 (201): 341; Ethan Knap, ?Bureaucratic Identity,? 
362. 
175 
exchanged for a certain quantity of something diferent? (he cites ?bread? for money and 
?an idea? for words) and also ?can be compared to something of like nature? (e.g. another 
coin or another word). Like money, ?[t]he content of a word is determined .. not by what 
it contains but by what exists outside of it. As an element in a system, the word has not 
only a meaning but also ? above al ? a value.?
32
 Derida builds on Saussure?s 
observation by insisting that both language and money are always and inevitably 
metaphorical in nature; he notes that any object which ?plays a role in the proces of 
axiological and semantic exchange .. does not completely escape the general law of 
metaphorical value.?
33
 Foucault, whose observation that circulation engenders economic 
increase we?ve already examined, puts a stil finer point on the connection between 
language and money. He states that because they are grounded in homologous systems 
of representation and signification, ?theories of money or trade have the same conditions 
of possibility as language itself.? As the de facto signifier in a system of commercial 
exchange, ?money ? if it is wel regulated ? .. function[s] in the same way as 
language.?
34
 
These post-structuralist views on money and speech are surprisingly evocative of 
similar medieval perspectives. Nicholas Perkins describes a ?verbal economy? of late-
medieval England in which ?the coinage .. was the vocabulary of loyal advice, of 
instruction and of complaint.? In this verbal economy, ?words could themselves be 
exchanged for money and influence,? an observation that cals to mind Foucault?s link 
                                                
32
 Ferdinand de Sausure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Baly and Albert Sechehaye, trans. 
Roy Haris (La Sale, IL: Open Court, 1986), 13-114. 
33
 Jacques Derida, ?White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,? New Literary History: 6 
(1974): 17. 
34
 Foucault, The Order of Things, 203. 
176 
between circulation and value as wel as the idiosyncratic exchange economy of 
Hoccleve?s own work.
35
  R. A. Shoaf also describes the metaphorical interdependence of 
speech and currency, stating broadly that ?the analogy between language and money is .. 
seriously medieval,? an analogy that would have ben available to Chaucer and to his 
disciples ?not only through ?experience? but also through impecable ?authority.??
36
  
Shoaf quotes Boethius to show how such an analogy might have been understood in the 
late Middle Ages: 
For sound is a kind of universal; names and words, on the other hand, are 
parts. Every part, however, is in the whole .. Thus just as a coin is 
copper impresed with a certain figure not only in order that it might be 
caled a coin but also in order that it might be the price of some specific 
thing, so, in the same way, words and names, are not only sounds, but are 
imposed to a certain signification of thoughts .. And thus, in this way, a 
sound ? that is, a significant sound ? is not sound only, but is caled a verb 
or name, just as a coin is not caled copper, but is caled, by its proper 
name, a coin, by means of what distinguishes it from other copper.
37
 
Like the modern theorists cited above, Boethius understands that both spoken words and 
money are to some degre defined by their inclusion within a group (cal that group 
?sounds? or ?metals?) but that they atain value through their specificity and distinctnes 
within that group. It is their individuality, their circulation, and finaly their metaphorical 
nature ? the ability of the specific word to stand in for an idea within verbal discourse or 
                                                
35
 Perkins, Counsel and Constraint, 5-6. 
36
 Shoaf, Curency of the Word, 8. 
37
 Boethius, De Interpretatione, quoted and translated in Shoaf, Curency of the Word, 10-1. 
177 
the ability of the specific coin to stand in for a commodity of equal value within 
economic discourse ? that unites the two things. As Shoaf concludes, ?Boethius 
recognizes that value, linguistic and economic, depends on relativity and diferentiation 
which are elements of exchange.?
38
   
From his position at the Privy Seal, where an appropriately worded petition could 
produce significant financial returns for both clerk and petitioner, Hoccleve would have 
understood these Boethian precepts. He would have been acutely aware of the 
fluctuating, metaphorical exchange relationship that existed between coin and 
commodity, and he would have sen, each time a petition produced a monetary return, 
the efective literalization of the value of the word. Similarly, the economy of ?The 
Monk Who Clad the Virgin? can itself be understood as literalizing the metaphorical 
value of the spoken word ? as aggresively commodifying the monk?s uttered Ave Marias 
by forcing a fixed exchange value onto them (50 Ave Marias + 5 Pater Nosters = 1 
sleve).  Thus, I submit, it is not a stretch to se Hoccleve?s monk trading in Ave Marias 
and spending them like so many groats, nor is it a stretch to think that Hoccleve himself 
understood some spoken utterances, such as prayers, to operate as a medium of exchange 
in a manifestly economic system. 
 
By positing a multivalent eschatological economy in which prayer is efectively bartered 
for salvation, ?The Monk who Clad the Virgin? offers us the clearest vision among 
Hoccleve?s devotional lyrics of how speech might function amidst the hierarchical and 
economic tensions created where feudaly inflected exchange intersects with the 
                                                
38
 Shoaf, Curency of the Word, 1. 
178 
exigencies of the capitalist marketplace.  Nonetheles, many of the poet?s Marian poems 
invoke similar economic language, and some suggest the same kinds of reciprocity that 
we se in ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin.? Indeed, the sheer number of Hoccleve?s 
poems to the Virgin suggest that Hoccleve saw in the figure of Mary ? and particularly in 
her traditional role as intercesor between man and God ? a useful figure with which to 
explore these varieties of exchange and to navigate their often conflicting currents.  
Perhaps the most straightforward of these Marian lyrics is a long prayer to the Virgin 
now known simply as ?Ad Beatam Virginem? (Furnival X). In this plea for salvation, 
Hoccleve alows a relatively straightforward arangement of lordship and vasalage to 
predominate as he offers himself wholly to Mary and John the Apostle in return for his 
spiritual preservation: ?Vn-to yow I my soule commende, / Marie and Iohn, for my 
sauuacioun! / Helpith me !at I may my lyf amende .. Be in myn herte now and 
everemore!? (134-139).
 39
 The traditional precepts of homage and dependency that such 
a sacral relationship suggests are borne out when Hoccleve promises to ?worship & 
honure? (64) the virgin ?Syn [since] vp on thee / was leid the charge and cure .. to hele 
our shoules of hir sek estat? (66-70). Within this traditional arangement, spoken 
prayers ? both the poet?s and the Blesed Virgin?s ? are an understood medium of 
exchange. Not only does Hoccleve imply that he wil perform prayers in the course of 
his ?worship and honure,? he asks the Virgin outright to ?presente .. my prayer vn-to thy 
sone? (13) and makes reference to her own eficacious prayers when he notes, ?To 
washe away our cloudeful offense .. your preyre may so moche auaile? (109-12).  
                                                
39
 Citations from Furinval and Golancz?s edition of Hocleve?s Works: The Minor Poems are cited 
parentheticaly by editor and poem number, and by line. 
179 
Speech proves similarly eficacious in Hoccleve?s ?Balade for Robert Chichele,? 
but the poem itself registers a more multivalent economic sensibility than does ?Ad Beata 
Virginem.? Specificaly, the poem finds Hoccleve atempting to atain from God ?a 
purueance? (?Balade,? 24) in exchange for ?[his] speeche and by [his] sawe? (21). The 
word ?purueance? itself ? which may refer either to spiritual or to material provisions ? 
occupies an ambiguous position within Hoccleve?s interpenetrating economic systems, 
one that evokes many of the tensions evident in ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin.? 
Hoccleve hints at this same ambiguity in another of his Marian addreses (Furnival VII), 
a poem in which he frets that Mary, ?Modir of lyf? and ?cause of al our welthe? (1), wil 
not ?acepte [his] preyeere? (21) or ?purchase .. pardoun? (80) for his sins.  
The mingled economies that Hoccleve presents in ?Balade for Robert Chichele? 
are stil more strongly evoked in his ?Item de Beata Virgine? (Gollancz V): 
Syn Thow, modir of grace, haast euere in mynde 
Alle tho / !at vp-on thee han memorie, 
Thy remembrance ay oghte oure hertes bynde 
Thee for to honure / blisful qweene of glorie, 
To ale cristen folk / it is notorie 
"at thow art shee / in whom !at al man-kynde 
May truste fully / grace and help to fynde. (1-7) 
The dynamic that this pasage describes, in which Mary?s ?remembrance.. oghte oure 
hertes bynde,? bespeaks the vertical alignments implicit in ?The Monk Who Clad the 
Virgin.? This point is further underscored later in the poem when Hoccleve describes 
Mary?s salvific intercesion on behalf of her ?seruant!? (84). But, the lady/servant 
180 
relationship that the poem proposes is frequently undercut by language suggestive of 
market exchange, such as Hoccleve?s description of Mary?s ?purchase of .. foryeunese? 
as a ?bysynese .. "at vn-to man-kynde is so profitable? (118-121) or his concern that 
Christ ?hath boght our soules at swich prys / !at derere might no thyng han be boght? 
(106-107).  
As the co-mingling of economic systems begins to emerge in ?Item de Beata 
Virgine,? so, too, do the economic overtones of the spoken word. The speaker asks, for 
example, ?What wight is !at that with angwish and wo / Tormented is if he preye vn-to 
thee / Him to deliuere and to putte him there-fro? (8-10), a statement that shows prayer 
circulating in the economy of salvation. He also marvels at how ?aceptable? (79) 
Mary?s own prayers are to Christ and even ponders the plight of individuals who cannot 
speak, reasoning that ?thogh !at preye may [their] tonge noght, / Yit holpe [are they] 
thurgh cry of hertes thoght? (13-14). Such a formulation goes so far as to re-imagine the 
usualy silent act of repentance as an act of bodily prayer, a de facto utterance. Salvation, 
it sems, needs to be purchased with some kind of spoken devotional, even if it is the 
unheard speech of the heart. 
 While these Marian addreses al implicitly afirm the power of spoken prayer and 
engage with metaphors of exchange to describe their respective redemptive economies, 
none rivals the complexity that we se in ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin? except 
Hoccleve?s ?Complaint of the Virgin,? a work writen in the voice of Mary as she mourns 
Christ?s crucifixion. A loose translation of a lyric from Guilaume deGuilevile?s 
P?lerinage de l??me, this planctus Mariae takes the form of a series of apostrophes 
spoken by the Virgin Mary. Each of these apostrophes finds Mary lamenting her son?s 
181 
death not in the broad terms of Christian redemptive theology but in the excruciatingly 
intimate terms of a human mother witnesing the death of her human son. Her first 
apostrophe, beginning ?O fader God, how fers and how cruel? (?Conpleynte? 1), 
exemplifies the poem?s general approach: 
?I had ioye entuere and also gladnese 
Whan !u betook him e to clothe and wrappe 
In mannes flesche. I wend, in soothfastness, 
Have had for euere joye be the lappe. 
But hath sorwe caught me with his trappe. 
My ioye hath made a permutacioun 
With wepynge and ek lamentacioun.? (8-14)
40
 
After making her complaint to God, Mary addreses in succesion the Holy Ghost, the 
angel Gabriel, Saint Elizabeth, the woman who blesed Christ (Luke 11:27), Simeon, 
Saint Joachim, and finaly Christ Himself, implicating each in explicitly personal aspects 
of her loss. Eventualy, she extends her lament beyond this coterie to addres death, the 
sun, the earth, the angels, and, at last, the whole of humanity itself. With this final 
apostrophe, however, Mary?s rhetorical stance shifts dramaticaly from the 
claustrophobicaly personal to the emphaticaly universal. The Virgin now asks the 
?sones of Adam? (227) to lament with her, to ?bymeneth [Christ] in herte and cheere and 
vois? (231) and to recognize that ?for [our] gilt makith he correcioun / And amendes right 
by his owne deeth? (236-237). No longer speaking only as the inward-looking and 
                                                
40
 The lyric is editorialy titled ?Conpleynte Paramont,? in Elis, ?My Compleinte? and Other Poems, 53-
63. I refer to it as ?The Complaint of the Virgin? in order to avoid confusing inconsistencies with other 
recent criticism dealing with the poem. 
182 
disconsolate mother of a human son, she now funnels her individual personal sorrows 
into the redemptive aspects of Christ?s sacrifice. 
 Within the entropic spiral of Mary?s personal loss, Jennifer Bryan recognizes a 
patern wherein ?the Virgin is made to represent the private relationships that must be 
sacrificed for the sake of public duty.?
41
 But the Virgin?s cycle of loss is also related to a 
fundamental collapse of the spoken word, colossal failure of traditional frameworks of 
devotional speech to prevent or even to asuage Mary?s suffering. The first suggestion 
the poem gives of this collapse comes in the fourth stanza when the Virgin asks the Holy 
Ghost, ?Why hast thu me not in thi remembraunce / Now at this tyme right as thu had 
tho?? (22-23). The Holy Ghost?s failure to remember Mary as she demands ? to met 
Mary?s unfulfiled expectations ? cals to mind the monk?s abbreviated prayer cycle and 
the half-finished garment it engenders, both of which speak to the eficacy of spoken 
prayer. 
In the following apostrophe Mary begins to make overt the breakdown of the 
economy of speech that her rebuke to the Holy Ghost only implied: 
?O Gaubriel, whan !at thou come aplace 
And madest vnto me thi salewyng 
And seidest thus, ?Heil Mary, ful of grace?, 
Whi ne had thu gove me warnyng 
Of !at grace that veyn is and faylyng, 
As thu now sest, and sey it weel beforne? 
Sith my ioye is me rafte, my grace is lorne.? (29-35) 
                                                
41
 Bryan, ?The Politics of Complaint,? 175. 
183 
In this stanza, the Holy Ghost?s lapse in ?remembraunce? is replaced by Gabriel?s failure 
to speak the truth; more precisely, it becomes Gabriel?s failure to speak enough of the 
truth, a distinction that again resonates with the monk?s initial inadequate prayer regimen 
in ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin.? But whereas the central flaw marking the monk?s 
Ave Maria was the number of prayers spoken, the central flaw marking Gabriel?s Ave 
Maria turns out to be the content of the Marian addres itself, a problem of kind rather 
than a problem of degre. Indeed, Gabriel?s addres to the Virgin at the Annunciation is 
revealed in this stanza to be fundamentaly insufficient, a kind of half truth that neither 
warns Mary of the crucifixion nor gives her any indication of the ?veyn and faylyng? 
nature of grace. For this reason, the Ave Maria, which in Hoccleve?s miracle of the 
Virgin functions both as salvific currency and as exchange commodity, only serves in the 
?Complaint of the Virgin? to sharpen Mary?s grief. 
Similar failures of the poem?s economy of devotional speech follow in quick 
succesion: Mary laments to Elizabeth that her words were not only insufficient but 
inacurate (?The word[es] !at thu spak in the mowntain / Be ended al in another maner / 
Than thu had wened? [37-39]); she tels Simeon that his speech was too acurate, bearing 
bad news instead of omiting it (?O Simeon, thow seidest me ful sooth, / The strook that 
perce shal my sones herte / My soule thirle it shal, and so it dooth? [50-52]); and finaly 
she upbraids her father Saint Joachim for his absence of utterance altogether (here 
imagined as minstrelsy), complaining that he has no harp ?wherwith me make light / And 
me to conforte in my woful torment? (66-67). With startling compresion, The Virgin of 
Hoccleve?s planctus Mariae ascribes to the spoken utterance ? starting with the Ave 
Maria itself ? a litany of grievances and painful elisions, endemic failings that esentialy 
184 
undo the spiritual economy Hoccleve represents in ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin? and 
that cal into question the eficaciousnes of devotional speech as a whole. Within this 
unstable economic framework, prayer sems unlikely to buy a petitioner?s redemption; 
rather, the spoken word in the ?Complaint of the Virgin? sems only to engender loss 
upon excruciating loss. 
 The nadir of the poem?s verbal economy comes when Mary speaks to Christ 
himself, stil suffering upon the cross. In Hoccleve?s poem, as in the Gospel of John, 
Christ cals His mother ?womman? (176) rather than ?Maria? or ?Mother.?
42
 In 
response, the Virgin begins aggresively to rupture her own name, changing it first from 
?Maria? to ?Mara? (a pun on amara or ?biternes?) and then from ?Marie? to ?mared? 
(183, 218) in token that ??I,? which is Ihesus, is fro me fal? (186).
43
 For this same 
reason, Mary eventualy renounces the name ?modir? (225) altogether; its leter ?i,? like 
the leters in ?Maria? and ?Marie,? is lost at the moment of the crucifixion. Bryan reads 
such ?distortions and dislocations? as Mary?s rejection of the self-referential ?I,? an act 
dramatizing within the Virgin ?a disolution of identity, of subjectivity itself.? But 
because Mary performs this disolution of subjectivity exclusively within language, those 
dislocations speak equaly strongly to the collapse of the speech that the poem enacts.
44
  
In this regard, it is especialy significant that each time Mary perverts her name, she does 
so specificaly with regard to its vocative functions: ?Wel may men clepe and cale me 
Mara / .. How sholde I lenger clept be Maria? (183-85); ?Marie? Nay, but ?mared? I thee 
                                                
42
 John 19:26: ?Cum vidiset ergo Iesus matrem, et discipulum stantem, quem diligebat, dicit matri suae: 
Mulier, ece filius tus [When Jesus therefore had sen his mother and the disciple standing whom he 
loved, he saith to his mother: Woman, behold thy son].? 
43
 On Hocleve?s use of the Mara/Maria pun, se Ellis, ?My Compleinte? and Other Poems, 62, n. 182f. 
44
 Bryan, ?The Politics of Complaint,? 17. 
185 
cale? (218); ?of modir .. / No more maist thow clept be by thy name? (225-26). Each of 
these linguistic disjunctures deals with the Virgin?s name as it is ?cale[d]? and ?clept.? 
Moreover, each implicitly but decidedly negates her connection to the invocatory words 
of the Ave Maria itself and disociates her from the very forms of remembrance upon 
which Marian devotion and salvation so conspicuously depend. 
 A number of critics have discussed the gender and power dynamics implicit in 
late medieval acounts of the Virgin?s suffering. Thomas Bestul describes the intensely 
tearful reaction of the Virgin in later medieval planctus Mariae as part of ?a theological 
doctrine .. that stresed the idea of Mary?s unique compasion, or co-suffering, with 
Christ, a doctrine that gradualy created an exalted position for Mary as the co-redemptrix 
of the human race.?
 45
 He locates within the Virgin?s emotional meltdown a space in 
which Mary?s agency, both as divine mediator and as woman, is simultaneously 
constrained and amplified. 
 
But I want to argue that within the particular economy of 
speech that Hoccleve proposes in his ?Complaint of the Virgin,? the systemic failure of 
the spoken word that coincides with Mary?s breakdown is more monolithicaly 
threatening; indeed, it undermines the very means of salvation that Marian intercesion, 
and particularly the Ave Maria, enable.  
It is inevitable, therefore, that the poem recuperate the eficaciousnes of speech ? 
both as prayer and a means to invoke the Virgin ? and afirm its role in an economy of 
salvation. Such an afirmation comes in the final thre stanzas of the work when Mary 
?at last .. performs her ordained role, mediating between sinful humanity and crucified 
                                                
45
 Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Pasion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadephia: 
University of Pensylvania Pres, 193), 13. 
186 
Christ.?
46
 Turning to addres the ?sones of Adam,? the Virgin suddenly refocuses her 
personal lament outward, asking the reader to ?se how my sone for your gilt and blame / 
Hangith heer al bybled vpon the crois? (299-300). Mary also refers to herself as ?a 
modir? (239), a term that she had repudiated only a few lines before but which now 
serves to reasure that she has resumed her traditional identity as ?Goddes modir, of vertu 
the flour? (?Monk? 35). Finaly, the Virgin exhorts the reader to mourn Christ ?in herte 
and cheere and vois? (231), thus emphasizing the role of spoken prayer in remembrance 
and inviting the poem?s addreses to asume a devotional stance similar to that 
displayed in ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin.?  
But ?vois? is not the only thing rehabilitated in these final lines; along with the 
afirmation of spoken piety, the final stanzas also witnes the return of the reciprocal 
structures that were so central to the salvific economy of Hoccleve?s miracle of the 
Virgin: 
If yee to him han any afecioun 
Now for his wo your hertes oghten colde. 
Shewith your loue and your dilecioun. 
For your gilt makith he correcioun 
And amendes right by his owne deeth. 
That ye nat rewe on him, myn herte it sleth. (233-38) 
The spiral of loss dramatized in the first part of the poem ? the very failure of prayer 
itself to function in fulfilment of the Christian promise of redemption ? is replaced here 
by an economy in which the interdependent relationship between Christ and mankind is 
                                                
46
 Bryan, ?The Politics of Complaint,? 178. 
187 
paramount, in which the faithful reciprocate the ?correcioun? of His martyrdom when 
they ?Shewith [their] loue and [their] dilecioun? (235), and in which their prayer ? their 
?vois? ? both ensures and requites ?redempcioun? (245). Indeed, the Virgin herself now 
claims that any failure to honor and mourn her son appropriately wil ? [her] herte .. 
sleth? (238), a statement that proposes types of exchange similar to those we se in ?The 
Monk Who Clad the Virgin.? Speaking now in her capacity as heavenly intercesor, 
Mary grieves not for the death of her son but for the prospect of humankind?s failure to 
recognize and reciprocate the blood ?despent in gret foysoun.. for.. redempcioun? 
(244-45). Within the positive eschatological framework of the poem?s final stanzas, the 
reciprocal relationship of redemption is once again fulfiled by the spoken words of 
prayer, words that purchase salvation rather than engender loss. 
 
Economies of Madnes and Recovery in Hoccleve?s Series 
Hoccleve?s Marian poetry thus develops a devotional economy predicated 
simultaneously on the hierarchical precepts of noble gift giving and on the more 
horizontal arangements that prevailed in England?s vibrant money economy, described 
by Le Paterson as one ?of the central elements that constitute[d] life in late medieval 
London.?
47
 I have argued that Hoccleve posits spoken prayer as a key medium of 
exchange within that devotional economy, a de facto currency whose value is predicated 
not only upon its circulation but also upon its ability to perform necesary salvific work. 
Within his Marian lyrics ? and most evidently within ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin? 
and the ?Complaint of the Virgin? ? Hoccleve offers his readers a soteriology that 
                                                
47
 Lee Paterson, ??What is Me??: Self and Society in the Poetry of Thomas Hocleve,? Studies in the Age 
of Chaucer 23 (202): 468. 
188 
depends upon these economic and linguistic features. The real threat to our salvation, his 
poems demonstrate, comes when one or another of them breaks down: when spoken 
prayers are flawed or incomplete; when the intercesor makes herself unavailable to the 
supplicant; when the supplicant does not provide an adequate number of prayers to the 
intercesor. But if we put its overtly soteriological aspects aside, this idiosyncratic 
economy of speech cannot be relegated solely to Hoccleve?s devotional works. Rather, 
the economic and linguistic dynamic that Hoccleve represents in his Marian lyrics 
asumes a central position in his secular poems, particularly in his final group of works, 
the five linked poems known as The Series. This unity between Hoccleve?s sacred and 
secular writing ? this link from the eficacious prayer to the eficacious petition by way 
of the often-empty purse ? iluminates close afinities among religious, economic and 
even political redemption in Hoccleve?s corpus, and it underscores the increasing work 
that the spoken word was understood to perform in the early years of the Lancastrian 
dynasty. 
Responses to the autobiographical elements of The Series have varied widely. 
Most earlier critics understood the poem?s acount of Hoccleve?s ?wilde infirmite? 
(Series 1.40) and its aftermath to be uncritical self-description, so much so that D. C. 
Gretham could bemoan an overal critical response to the work that simply ?took 
Thomas Hoccleve at his word? and ascribed neither a rhetorical nor narative function to 
his autobiographical stance.
48
 Gretham?s lament, though, is something of an 
overstatement: five years earlier, John Burrow had caled The Series a poem 
?preoccupied with the busines of its own composition,? and ten years before that, 
                                                
48
 D.C. Gretham, ?Self-Referential Artifacts: Hocleve?s Persona as a Literary Device,? Modern 
Philology, 86 (1989): 242. 
189 
Penelope Doob had argued that Hoccleve?s presentation of his disease and recovery owed 
a great deal to conventional medieval understandings of madnes as both punishment for 
and purgation of sin.
49
 What these two readings have in common, as Gretham ight 
suggest, is a general asumption of the truth value of Hoccleve?s acount, which is to say 
they both acept, either tacitly or explicitly, Hoccleve?s madnes and recovery as actual 
historical events. Nonetheles, the readings also show Hoccleve?s response to his 
madnes, whether autobiographical or not, to be mediated through specific cultural and 
literary filters, a point that is ultimately more significant, I would asert, than whether 
Hoccleve experienced exactly what he describes.  
Recent critical responses to The Series have largely adhered to this patern, 
though they have posited an increasingly diverse range of asesments: Hoccleve?s work 
has been perceived alternately as demonstrating proto-humanist anxiety about a medieval 
world stil uncertain about the place of the individual, as detailing a psychosomatic 
response to the exigencies of life in fiftenth-century London, as revealing ?the workings 
of a consciousnes for which self-knowledge and social aceptance are at once goals to 
be achieved and conclusions to be avoided,? and finaly as developing ?a sophisticated 
meditation upon the iresolvable fragmentation of the self and the intricate connections 
between [Hoccleve?s] poetic project and the specific cultural milieu of the Privy Seal.?
50
  
Like these readings, my own discussion of the poem does not depend upon the 
                                                
49
 John Burow, ?Hocleve?s Series: Experience and Boks,? in Fiftenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays 
ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, CT: Archon Boks, 1984), 260; Penelope Dob, Nebuchadnezar?s 
Children: Conventions of Madnes in Midle English Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Pres, 
1974), especialy 208-231. 
50
 Stephen Harper, Insanity, Individuals, and Society in Late-Medieval English Literature: The Subject of 
Madnes (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Melen Pres, 203), especialy 173-219; Mathew Boyd Goldie, 
?Psychosomatic Ilnes and Identity in London, 1416-1421: Hocleve?s Complaint and Dialogue with a 
Friend,? Exemplaria 1 (199): 23-52; Paterson, ?What Is Me?? 44; Knap, The Bureaucratic Muse, 163. 
190 
autobiographical verity of Hoccleve?s madnes and recovery. Though Hoccleve does 
insist upon positioning himself at the very center of his work, both refering to his 
?felawis of the Priue Sel? (1.296) and inscribing his own name in the friend?s addres in 
the ?Dialogue? (2.3, 20), the poetic ?I? that he develops within it is nonetheles a 
narative persona, one whose autobiographical function should not eclipse its rhetorical 
one. I am interested in examining the linguistic economy that Hoccleve uses his 
autobiographical persona to develop, an economy that, in itself, proposes a path to 
salvation similar to that depicted in the Marian lyrics.  
In the secular Series that salvation is not the spiritual redemption of the penitent 
but the psychological and social redemption of a man struggling to come to grips with his 
?!ou!tful maladie? (1.21). Hoccleve advances it most overtly in the ?Complaint,? the 
?Dialogue with a Friend,? the brief continuance of the ?Dialogue? at the beginning of the 
?Tale of Jonathas,? and the envoy to Lady Westmorland ? the segments of the Series 
framing the work?s central thre narative exempla and those most commonly labeled 
autobiographical by modern readers. In the first segment, the ?Complaint,? Hoccleve 
depicts himself ruminating upon his madnes in solitude, engaged only in the private 
actions of reading and thought. The opening lines of the poem emphasize this solitude by 
darkly inverting the opening lines of Chaucer?s Canterbury Tales, a work whose very 
organizing conceit ? tales told on a springtime pilgrimage to Canterbury ? emphasizes the 
importance of ?felaweshipe? and ?compaignye?: 
Aftir !at heruest inned had hise sheues, 
And that the broun sesoun of Mihelmese 
Was come, and gan the tres robbe of her leues, 
191 
That grene had ben and in lusty freishenese, 
And hem into colour of !elownese 
Had died and doun throwen vndirfoote, 
That chaunge sanke into myn herte roote. (1.1-7) 
Here, as Burrow writes, ?November drives Hoccleve in upon himself in solitary 
meditation.?
51
 Whereas Chaucer ?on a day.. by aventure yfale / In felawshipe? (CT I 
19, 25-26), Hoccleve ?vppon a ni!t, / Si!ynge sore .. in [his] bed lay? (1.17-18), quietly 
pondering his ?siknese? (1.22) and its sad consequences. In a continued inversion of 
Chaucer?s text, Hoccleve relates how his friends undertook pilgrimages for him during 
his infirmity; they leave him in his solitude until the ?gref aboute [his] herte so sore 
swal? (1.29) that he ?nolde kepe it cloos no more? (1.32). 
Phrases like these propose Hoccleve?s isolation to be a physical ailment, 
tantamount in some ways to the poet?s ?bodily sikenese? (1.38) itself. But as the poem 
continues, the terms of that isolation shift. Rather than continuing to develop the stifling, 
bodily solitude presented in the opening stanzas, the poem increasingly insists upon a 
decidedly linguistic isolation, one in which Hoccleve is alone even ?among the pres? 
(1.73) by virtue of his exclusion from spoken discourse. Initialy, such linguistic 
isolation sems only to be an extension of the physical isolation of the prologue; 
Hoccleve complains, for example, that ?hem !at weren wonte me for to cale .. Her heed 
they caste awry, / Whanne I hem ete, as they not me sy? (1.75-77), a description of his 
enforced solitude that highlights his physical disociation from his former acquaintances 
and, as Knapp suggests, serves to ?emphasize a sense of simultaneous isolation and 
                                                
51
 Burow, ?Experience and Boks,? 261. 
192 
claustrophobia.?
52
 Soon, however, Hoccleve?s isolation begins to manifest itself in the 
same terms of remembrance (or lack of remembrance) that we witnesed in the Marian 
lyrics: ?For!eten I was al oute of mynde awey, / As he !at deed was from hertis cherte? 
(1.80-81). Eventualy Hoccleve?s solitude is predicated almost entirely upon an inability 
to engage meaningfully in conversation. The poet?s friends speak around Hoccleve but 
not to him: ?Thus spake manie oone and seide by me? (1.85); Hoccleve overhears 
conversations about him but is in no position to respond: ?Tho wordis, hem vnwwar, cam 
to myn ere? (1.91). Bereft of speech, Hoccleve is regarded as an animal by his former 
intimates, one of whom ?seiden [he] loked as a wilde ster? (1.120) while ?anothir seide 
.. ?Full bukkish is his brayn?? (1.122-23). Hoccleve listens to the words of others, but 
these only propel him into his own thoughts rather than into speech (?I leide an ere ay to 
as I by wente, / And herde al, and !us in myn herte I caste: / ?Of longe abidinge here I 
may me repente? [1.134-35]). Exiled from the spoken commerce of his former friends, 
Hoccleve finaly alows himself to descend entirely into silence: ?Forwhy, as I had lost 
my tunges keie, / Kepte I me cloos, and trussid me my weie? (1.144-45). Despite the 
slanderous ?suffring wronge? (1.179) that has been done to him, Hoccleve has ?not 
answerid a!en, but kepte scilence / Leste !at men of me deme wolde? (1.180-81). At the 
very best, these pasages propose a Thomas Hoccleve who is on the thin peripheries of 
spoken discourse; at the worst, they reveal a Hoccleve who is utterly silent, even in the 
face of profered speech. 
David Mils argues that by ?[approaching] him through a diagnostic vocabulary? 
the people who speak about Hoccleve ?imprison him ? and themselves ? in their 
                                                
52
 Knap, The Bureaucratic Muse, 169. 
193 
discourse.?
53
 If that is indeed the case, however, those same speakers also seal Hoccleve 
off from their discourse, hermeticaly enclosing him in a third-person silence within and 
precluding him from participating in their verbal economy and their community. 
Significantly, Hoccleve sums up his linguistic isolation in explicitly economic terms: 
My wele [wealth], adieu, farwel, my good fortune. 
Oute of !oure tables me planed han !e. 
Sithen welny eny wi!t for to commvne 
With me loth is, farwel prosperite. 
I am no lenger of !oure liuere. 
"e haue me putte oute of !oure retenaunce 
Adieu, my good auenture and good chaunce. (1.267-73) 
In a sentiment that imediately recals Foucault?s observation that ?when goods can 
circulate .. they multiply, and wealth increases,? Hoccleve draws a direct equation 
between his failure to function within a money economy and his inability to ?commvne? 
with his friends. Speech and specie here are two sides of the same coin; a person who 
?may but smal seie? (1.264) wil find himself unable to produce wealth, either linguistic 
or fiscal, within an economy of speech. If in the Marian lyrics, particularly in the 
?Complaint of the Virgin,? we se how a breakdown in the economy of speech threatens 
spiritual redemption, here we se how a similar economic breakdown imperils 
Hoccleve?s ability to atain psychological redemption. 
                                                
53
 David Mils, ?The Voices of Thomas Hocleve,? Essays on Thomas Hocleve, ed. Catherine Bat 
(Turnhout, BE: Brepolis Pres, 196), 96. 
194 
Appropriately, the first respite Hoccleve finds from his sorrows comes in the form 
of a dialogue ? a borowed volume of Isidore of Sevile?s Synonyma, in which ?a man 
lamenting his miseries .. is interupted and admonished by reason, who advises him to 
consider the sufferings of others, and to realize that his sorrows are justly ordained by 
God.?
54
 Reading this Boethian consolation does not necesarily constitute a triumphant 
re-entry into the economies of speech from which Hoccleve has been excluded; however, 
he does describe the Synonyma as a book that feds him wel ?with the speche of 
Resoun? (1.315), a formulation that suggests that he engages with the text as he would 
with actual spoken discourse. As Roger Elis notes, ?For Hoccleve .. books are an item 
of mental as wel as commercial currency, and their circulation joins readers and writers 
literaly no les than metaphoricaly.?
55
 Moreover, the pseudo-speech that Hoccleve 
enacts by reading Isadore sems to alow him at least some degre of redemption; in any 
event, he castes his sorrow ?to the cok? (1.386) and bids it farewel. Isadore?s dialogue 
encourages Hoccleve to understand his madnes as a malady ?wich cam of Goddis 
visitacioun? (1.382) and over which Hoccleve has litle control. 
Hoccleve?s reasertion of a relationship with the divine is of fundamental 
importance to the ?Complaint?; indeed, I want to suggest that the outlines of such a 
relationship are strongly reminiscent of the relationship the monk develops with the 
Virgin Mary in ?The Monk who Clad the Virgin.? This resemblance becomes clear near 
                                                
54
 Both A.G. Rig and J. A. Burow have identified the bok Hocleve refers to as the Synonyma, a work 
widely known in the Midle Ages. Se A. G. Rig, ?Hocleve?s Complaint and Isidore of Sevile,? 
Speculum 45 (1970): 564-74 (quotation from 56); J. A. Burow ?Hocleve?s Complaint and Isidore of 
Sevile Again,? Speculum 73 (198): 424-28. 
55
 Roger Elis, ?Introduction,? ?My Compleinte? and Other Poems, 3. 
195 
the close of Hoccleve?s poem when the Privy Seal clerk relates how God first aflicted 
and then healed him of his madnes: 
Thoru! Goddis iust doom and his iugement 
And for my best, nowe I take and deeme, 
"af !at good lord me my punischement. 
In welthe I took of him noon hede or !eme, 
Him for to plese and him honoure and queme, 
And he me !af a boon on for to gnawe, 
Me to correcte and of him to have awe. 
 
He !af me wit and he tooke it away 
Whanne that he sy that I it mis dispente, 
And !af a!ein whan it was to his pay. 
He grauntide me my giltis to repente, 
And hensforwarde to sete myn entente 
Vnto his deite to do plesaunce, 
And to amende my sinful gouernaunce. (1.393-406) 
As in his Marian lyric, Hoccleve establishes in these stanzas a supplicant/intercesor 
relationship constructed along the lines of a vertical hierarchy. And while that verticality 
is les dramaticaly undercut by the overt references to interdependence that we se in 
Hoccleve?s ?Monk Who Clad the Virgin,? this feudaly inflected relationship stil offers a 
certain degre of reciprocity, for example, when Hoccleve excoriates himself for his 
196 
failure to ?please and .. honor and queme? God, or when he promises ?Vnto his deite to 
do plesaunce.? The language of charity and philanthropic giving, so prevalent in the 
Marian lyrics, are also important to the redemptive economy of the ?Complaint.? 
Hoccleve offers God thanks for ?thin infinit goodnese / and thi !iftis and benefices ale? 
(1.411-12), an emphasis that recals both the gifts ?youen? by both monk and Mary in 
Hoccleve?s miracle of the Virgin and the benefices sporadicaly offered to Hoccleve 
himself at the Privy Seal.
56
  The same economy that alowed spiritual redemption in the 
devotional lyrics now enables psychological redemption in the secular ?Complaint.? 
 
The next parts of the series ? particularly the ?Dialogue? ? develop in a social seting the 
same redemptive linguistic economy that the ?Complaint? develops in a solitary one, thus 
rendering The Series as a kind of poetic diptych and acording the poem an overal 
typological structure in which the ?Dialogue? fulfils the promise of redemptive discourse 
only suggested in the ?Complaint.? To this end, the ?Dialogue? itself stands in for the 
Boethian exchange presented by Isadore?s Synonyma. To be sure, such a paralel is not 
exact; both Knapp and Paterson point out the discrepancies between the highly stylized 
language of the formal Boethian consolation and the ?entirely diferent discursive 
universe? that marks the more colloquial ?Dialogue.?
57
 Despite these diferences, 
however, both Isadore?s work and the ?Dialogue with a Friend? offer a dynamic of 
spoken exchange geared toward enabling Hoccleve?s social rehabilitation, a dynamic that 
gives Hoccleve aces to an economy of speech from which he has been exiled. Indeed, 
                                                
56
 Se Knap, ?Bureaucratic Identity,? 365. 
57
 Knap, The Bureaucratic Muse, 175; Paterson, ?What is Me?? especialy p. 44-448. 
197 
it is the spoken aspect of the ?Dialogue? (as opposed to the textual aspect of the 
?Complaint?) that the Series most prominently emphasizes. James Simpson shows how 
Hoccleve uses an aray of stylistic and rhetorical devices in the work ?to eface any sense 
of barier between the reader and the scene he or she witneses,? a strategy that both 
imparts to the ?Dialogue? the appearance of reality and suggests that for Hoccleve, ?the 
actual means to sanity .. lies in dialogue.?
58
 In its ostensible spoken-nes, then, the 
?Dialogue? sems to offer Hoccleve a degre of social redemption to go with the 
psychological and spiritual redemption he describes at the end of the ?Complaint.? 
 The emphasis that the ?Dialogue? places on spoken exchange as a means of 
redemption also reveals an important thematic connection between The Series and 
Marian lyrics such as ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin? and the ?Complaint of the 
Virgin,? a connection further reinforced by the comercial and economic metaphors that 
Hoccleve employs throughout the ?Dilogue? and, more broadly, throughout the Series.  
Nowhere are these metaphors more explicit than in Hoccleve?s lengthy and semingly 
arbitrary scred against coin-clippers and counterfeiters, an invective that readers have 
atempted to integrate into the poem?s concerns about madnes and social reintegration in 
a wide variety of ways. Paul Strohm, for example, has argued that Hoccleve?s diatribe 
implicitly supports the dynastic aims of the early Lancastrian kings, while Karen Smyth 
has read the pasage as a rhetorical move whereby Hoccleve emphasizes the temporal 
and political imediacy of the ?Dialogue.? Other readers have simply declared the 
pasage an aesthetic and thematic mistake, citing it as the ?the main blemish? on an 
                                                
58
 James Simpson, ?Madnes and Texts: Hocleve?s Series,? Chaucer and Fiftenth-Century Poetry, ed. 
Julia Bofey and Janet Cowen (Exeter: Short Run Pres, 191), 20, 24. Simpson is not alone in proposing a 
?talking cure? for Hocleve: Burow has raised the idea in ?Autobiographical Poetry,? especialy 402-05, 
and it has reapeared more recently in Sarah Tolmie, ?The Prive Scilence of Thomas Hocleve,? Studies in 
the Age of Chaucer 2 (200): 281-309. 
198 
otherwise unified poetic whole.
59
 But the ?cursid vice? (2.164) of coin-clipping that 
Hoccleve discusses brings isues of value and circulation to the fore. Given the strong 
economic language that marks descriptions of spoken exchange in the ?Complaint,? we 
belitle it at our own peril.  
Rather than dismising Hoccleve?s acount of coin-clipping as an aesthetic 
anomaly, we can more fruitfully examine it through the lens of spoken exchange. As 
Hoccleve describes them to his friend, the economic implications of coin-clipping are 
closely analogous to the social implications steming from Hoccleve?s ?!ou!tful 
maladie?: 
?Howe shal !e pore do in his holde 
No more moneie he ne haue at al 
Par cas but a noble or halpenie of golde, 
And it so thynne is and so narowe and smal 
That men the eschaunge eschewen oueral? 
Not wil it goo but miche he theronne lese. 
He moot do so, he may noon other chese.? (2.120-26) 
 This acount of how coin clipping afects the poor strongly foregrounds isues of 
exchange. Indeed, the very heart of the problem that Hoccleve describes is not the 
physical act of clipping (the practice of shaving smal amounts of gold off coins and thus 
making them ?narowe?) but the potential for clipped coins to be refused by merchants 
and kept out of circulation ? for their ?eschaunge [to be] eschewen.? What makes coins 
                                                
59
 Strohm, England?s Empty Throne, especialy p. 142-146; Karen Smyth, ?Reading Misreadings in 
Thomas Hocleve?s Series,? English Studies 87 (206): 16-17; Burow, ?Experience and Boks,? 263. 
Burow rites, ?The main blemish ? and it is a serious one ? is the pasage in which the poet harangues his 
friend on the evils of tampering with the coin of realm.? 
199 
worthles is not that they have been clipped per se but that they are unable to circulate, 
that they can no longer function efectively in an economy of exchange. 
Coin-clipping was perceived as a genuine threat in the early fiftenth century; 
Hoccleve refers in the ?Dialogue? (lines 2.136-40) to a series of statutes introduced by 
Parliament in 1421 standardizing the weight of English coinage and increasing 
punishments for counterfeiters and coin-clippers.
60
 But Hoccleve?s deeply personal 
indignation at the practice of clipping coins ? his insistence that coin-clipping ?hath hurt 
me sore? (2.101) and that it is the equal of murder, theft, extortion and heresy ? does not 
simply reflect a keen eye for current events or a desire to ingratiate himself to potential 
Lancastrian patrons. Rather, it reflects the struggle that Hoccleve describes so poignantly 
in the ?Complaint?: his struggle to reafirm his social and psychological solvency among 
his colleagues and friends by circulating his own speech among them; his struggle to 
spend the coin rendered suspect by his ?wilde infirmite? in the marketplace of socialy 
redemptive verbal exchange. Hoccleve reinforces this connection through a series of 
careful linguistic echoes: his concern that he ?may but smal seie but if men deme I rave? 
(1.264) finds a numismatic counterpart in his ?narowe and smal? (2.123) coins; his fear 
that the words of his felow privy seal clerks are of so litle value that ?thei mi!ten as wel 
haue holden her pees? (1.301) is repeated in the ?Dialogue? when he wonders how a coin 
?may .. holde his peis whanne it is washe [clipped]? (2.106); his ?feble wit? (1.277) 
becomes the coin-clipper?s ?feble moneie? (2.102). Hoccleve even asociates coin 
clipping with his madnes itself: the former he cals ?[t]hat venym [which] ouere wide 
and brood spredith? (2.170); the later he refers to as ?the greuous venim / That has 
                                                
60
 Se also Strohm, England?s Empty Throne, 143-144. 
200 
enfected and wildid my brain? (1.234-35). Significantly, the solution to both problems is 
shown to be identical: just as Hoccleve?s ?means to sanity .. lies in dialogue,? so too 
does the remedy for the problem of clipped coins lie in economic circulation, a proces of 
exchange through which, Hoccleve insists, ?Vnwaishen [uncorrupted] gold shal waishe 
awey !at vice? (2.182).
61
   
Dismised or marginalized by many critics, Hoccleve?s discussion of coin-
clipping should, therefore, more acurately be understood as the central conceit of the 
?Dialogue.? It is the metaphorical framework for the poem?s socialy redemptive 
economy, an economy whose respective failures and succeses alternately prevent and 
propel the poet?s fraught recovery. In this respect, the ?Dialogue? fundamentaly 
reproduces the networks of linguistic and economic exchange developed in Hoccleve?s 
Marian lyrics. The coin itself ? be it clipped or unclipped ? becomes a literal 
embodiment of the linguistic currency idealized in ?The Monk who Clad the Virgin?; the 
destabilization and proposed redemption of that coin echoes the analogous destabilization 
and redemption of speech in ?The Complaint of the Virgin.? Moreover, insofar as they 
ask us to recal the metaphorical links between the spoken word and the minted coin ? the 
?relativity and diferentiation? that Boethius ses connecting the two as wel as the 
signifying function that each holds within analogous systems of exchange
62
 ? Hoccleve?s 
coins, both clipped and whole, become a concrete manifestation of the metaphorical 
value the poet ascribes to the spoken word. They are emblematic of the properties of 
circulation that make the spoken word so valuable a commodity, and they further remind 
                                                
61
 Simpson, ?Madnes and Texts,? 24 
62
 Se Shoaf, Curency of the Word, 1; Foucault, The Order of Things, 203. 
201 
us of the corruption and subsequent devaluation to which speech, like coinage, is 
necesarily vulnerable. 
 If Hoccleve?s scred against coin clipping responds to his inability to circulate his 
own damaged coin within a linguistic economy, then the ?Dialogue? fits into the paterns 
of redemption through verbal exchange developed by the Series as a whole. First, the 
?Dialogue? extends the recuperative work hinted at in the ?Complaint? by replacing the 
implicit and solitary discourse of Isadore?s Synonyma with the explicit, social discourse 
of Hoccleve?s conversation. More important, however, the ?Dialogue? works to position 
the economy of speech developed in the Series into the same idiosyncratic and reciprocal 
economy developed in ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,? an economy that suggests, 
paradoxicaly, the simultaneous operation of a seigneurial, verticaly aligned hierarchy 
and a mercantile, horizontaly inflected arangement. Hoccleve aludes to the vertical 
structures of this economy when he invokes the Lancastrian ?patronage nexus? into 
which he hopes to enter his work; indeed, we would be hard presed to think of Hoccleve 
seking patronage from ?My lord of Gloucestre? (2.534), a man second only to ?our lord 
lige, our king victorious? (2.554), without considering the strict vertical strategies of 
exchange implicit in such a relationship.
63
 
Hoccleve?s friend in the ?Dialogue? suggests a similar hierarchy when he urges 
Hoccleve to atone for the misogyny of his translation of Christine de Pizan?s L?epistre de 
Cupide. By writing ?sumwhat now .. in honour and preysynge of [women]? (2.673-74), 
the friend insists, Hoccleve wil be able to redeem himself from the anger of his female 
readers and once again gain their favor. The friend offers Hoccleve the following advice: 
                                                
63
 The phrase ?patronage nexus? is from Strohm, England?s Empty Throne, 181 
202 
?Be heuy of thy gilt, and the confese, 
And satisfacioun do thow for it. 
Thow woost wel, on wommen gret wyt and lak 
Ofte haast thow put. Bewaar lest thow be qwyt. 
Thy wordes file wolde a quarter sak  
Which thow in whyt depeynted haast with blak.? (2.665-70) 
* * * * * 
?By buxum herte and by submisioun 
To hir graces, yildinge thee coupable, 
Thow pardon maist haue and remisioun, 
And do vnto hem plesance greable.? (2.687-90) 
The posture that the friend advises is one of abject submision, a posture drawn at once 
from the devotional stance that the monk asumes in ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin? 
and from the exaggerated positions of fealty and devotion that informed the discourse (if 
not necesarily the practice) of gender relations within the court. Indeed, Hoccleve?s 
friend advises the Privy Seal clerk to capitulate entirely to his female readers, to ?humble 
[his] goost? (2.692) and ?[ask] hir graces with gret repentance? (2.716), to ?yilde? 
himself (2.698) to the wil of women and ?take on thee swich rule and gouernance / as 
thee rede wolde? (2.718-19). Hoccleve, the friend suggests, wil escape from a courtly 
hel of his own making by ?prolle [prowling] aftir wommennes beneuolence? (2.744). In 
the face of the supplicatory posture Hoccleve asumes in the poem, we also se evidence 
of the self-interested philanthropy of the upper clases. This is particularly true when the 
friend instructs Hoccleve to ?do vnto hem [women] plesance greable? (2.690) in order 
203 
that he might gain ?pardon .. and remisioun? (2.689). The quid pro quo nature of such 
an arangement underscores the self-interest of Hoccleve?s outward humility. More 
telingly, after Hoccleve asumes the posture of subservience that his friend recommends, 
he writes ?I lowly me submite / To your bontes? (2.813-14), a phrase that both 
reinforces the seigneurial hierarchy that Hoccleve proposes and reminds us of the 
?bonte? that he hopes to receive for such submision. The phrase also pointedly recals 
Hoccleve?s description of Mary in ?Item de Beata Virgine? as ?Modir of pite, / Of al 
bounte thow veray cofre and cheste? (Gollancz V 127-29). It invites us to se Hoccleve 
in the Series as the same persona who repeatedly commends his soul to the Virgin in 
paroxysms of guilty, sinful abjection. 
But as with the Marian lyrics, the nature of the economy suggested by the poem is 
not entirely that of a feudaly inflected hierarchy of exchange. Indeed, within the 
strictures of the vertical hierarchy he advises, Hoccleve?s friend also suggests that the 
poet ?purchase? (2.678) with his ?gret craft and art? (2.682) the love of the women he 
has angered, and he warns Hoccleve that without such purchase he wil be ?qwyt? (2.668) 
for his perceived misogyny. Both of these sentiments resonate strongly with the precepts 
and the vocabulary of market exchange. Moreover, Hoccleve?s friend explicitly invokes 
Chaucer?s Wife of Bath as an ?auctrice? (2.694), a rhetorical move that draws atention to 
one of the Canterbury Tales?s most hierarchy-violating (not to mention most 
mercantilistic) pilgrims, even as it reverses traditional asumptions of authority by 
declaring a figure so known for her reliance on ?experience? to be an ?auctrice.? Such 
pasages thus undercut the strict hierarchy of intercesor and supplicant and suggest the 
simultaneous existence of a horizontaly aligned system of exchange based on mercantile 
204 
rather than feudal exchange strategies. Here again, as in the Marian lyrics, Hoccleve 
develops an economy of exchange in which a palpable tension exists between coexisting 
models of noble giving and of the marketplace. 
Despite their manifest similarities, the redemptive economies shared by the 
Marian Lyrics and the ?Dialogue? diferently construe the specific nature of the linguistic 
currency upon which each economy relies. The primary medium of exchange in 
Hoccleve?s Marian lyrics is the spoken prayer. In ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin,? 
Hoccleve?s monk gives the Virgin her garment by uttering a prescribed cycle of Ave 
Marias, the same prayers with which he later ensures himself a place at the head of his 
abbey, with which he is able engender the salvific multiplication of the final stanzas, and 
for which the Virgin ?souffisantly qwythth? (123) him. Prayers perform a similar 
function in the darker ?Complaint of the Virgin,? where Mary?s verbal self-efacement 
threatens to deny aces to the salvific economy of ?herte and cheere and vois? 
(?Complaint? 231) and to the redemption ofered by Christ?s sacrifice. The ?Dialogue,? 
however, posits a system of exchange which, while functionaly the same as that of the 
Marian lyrics, sems driven more by the writen word than by the spoken, a system 
whose currency is the poetic text itself. This is not to say that speech is unimportant in 
the poem; the ?Dialogue,? after al, purports to be the transcript of a conversation 
between friends, a poem that strives to create the ilusion of dialogic imediacy. This 
very dialogic aspect of the poem, after al, grants Hoccleve entre into the economies of 
exchange that catalyze his social and psychological recovery. But when Hoccleve?s 
friend encourages Hoccleve to asume a devotional stance in order to ?purchace? (2.668) 
back the love of women, he explicitly encourages the poet to ?wryte in honour and 
205 
preysynge,? rather than to speak. And when Hoccleve finaly does ?submite / to [the] 
bountes? (2.813-14) of his female readers, he ofers not to verbalize their praises but to 
?translate .. a tale .. late sy [sen], in honour and plesance / of yow, my ladyes? (2.820-
22). Within the socialy and psychologicaly redemptive economy of the Series, the 
poem itself, like the spoken utterance, becomes a medium of economic exchange. The 
poet?s writen statement joins the spoken devotional utterance as a currency that moves 
up the seigneurial hierarchy of philanthropic giving and across the helter-skelter, 
horizontal plane of the marketplace. 
 What the ?Complaint? performs for Hoccleve psychologicaly and the ?Dialogue? 
performs socialy, the Series?s envoy to Lady Westmoreland performs extra-textualy. 
Signed ?Humble seruant to your gracious noblese / T. Hoccleve? (Series 5.741-2) and 
included imediately after the ?Tale of Jonathas,? the envoy establishes a recuperative 
economy beyond the hermetic confines of the poem itself, one whose efect sems 
focused not on Hoccleve?s narative persona but on Hoccleve himself:
64
 
Go, smal book, to the noble excelence 
Of my lady of Westmerland, and seye 
Hir humble seruant with al reuerence 
Him recommandith vnto hir nobleye 
And byseche hir on my behalue and preye 
Thee to receyue for hir owne right, 
And looke thow in al manere weye 
                                                
64
 Lee Paterson discuses what he considers Hocleve?s dubious decision to dedicate the Tale of Jonathas, 
a profoundly anti-feminist, even misogynistic tale, to Joan Beaufort, Lady Westmorland: ?How could 
Hocleve posibly have thought it apropriate to dedicate this particular tale, which describes a woman 
persuading a young man to part with his inheritance and then being savagely punished, to this particular 
woman?? Se Paterson, ?What is Me??: 450. 
206 
To plese hir wommanhede do thy might. (5.733-40) 
Except for its nod to Chaucer?s Troilus and Criseyde (?Go, litel bok, go litel myn 
tragedye? [TC 5.1786]), this conventional envoy would under most circumstances be of 
only pasing interest. In the specific context of The Series, however, the envoy sems to 
hold for Hoccleve the genuine prospect of redemption from his madnes. Indeed, if the 
autobiographical frame elements of the poem are, as many readers have suggested, 
reflective of Hoccleve?s own struggle for social redemption after a period of mental 
ilnes, the Envoy may be sen as a final step in the poet?s rehabilitation, a short verse 
that denotes the establishment of a redemptive relationship of exchange outside of the 
confines of the text. And whereas writen poetry replaces spoken prayer and spoken 
petition as a medium of exchange within The Series, The Series itself subsequently 
becomes the medium of exchange within its own envoy. Like the prayers in the Marian 
lyrics, The Series functions to ?byseche [Lady Westmorland] on [Hoccleve?s] behalue? 
and ?to plese hir wommanhede.? It recapitulates the feudaly inflected hierarchy of 
philanthropic giving by recommending the ?humble? Hoccleve ?vnto hir nobleye? and by 
showing Hoccleve?s ?reuerence? in the face of Lady Westmoreland?s ?noble excelence.? 
Within the system of patronage and reciprocity that Hoccleve invokes here, he himself 
asumes the position of the monk in his miracle of the Virgin, offering both his fealty and 
his labor, expecting in recompense the fruits of the lady?s ?gracious noblese? (5.741). 
 
Clothing the Virgin and Clothing the Emperor 
Hoccleve?s Marian lyrics and the Series develop an economy of speech that also 
figures in the poet?s remaining autobiographical works, La Male Regle and The Regement 
207 
of Princes. Writen as a penitential lyric and completed between 1405 and 1406, La Male 
Regle is a ostensibly a first-person acount of Hoccleve?s mispent youth, a ?confesion 
in the form of a prayer to the god of health.?
65
 As such, the poem imediately puts itself 
into a devotional framework familiar from the Marian lyrics, a verticaly oriented 
hierarchy that is necesarily predicated upon the offering of the spoken word ? here the 
words of confesion ? to efect redemption. Into this devotional framework, Hoccleve 
quickly interjects the economic and linguistic metaphors that we have sen in his other 
poems, refering to the god of health as the ?grounde and roote of prosperite? (Male 2), 
lamenting that ?the venym of faueles tonge / Hath mortified .. prosperite? (211-12), and 
even drawing an implicit link between the words of confesion and the coin of the realm: 
?By coyn, I gete may swich medecyne / As may myn hurtes al, !at me greue, / Exyle 
clene, and voide me of pyne? (446-48).
66
 In this way, Hoccleve efectively conflates 
coin and auricular confesion; the spoken word itself becomes the currency that finaly 
voids the poet of his pain. 
 La Male Regle?s development of a devotional linguistic economy akin to that of 
the Marian lyrics comes across most strikingly in the poem?s final few stanzas. 
Beginning conspicuously with the words ?I preye? (417), Hoccleve sublimates his 
confesion to ?Helthe? into a pecuniary petition to ?my noble lord !at now is a tresorer? 
(418), Lord Furnival. Hoccleve asks Furnival for his annuity (419-422), and then, under 
the auspices of apologizing for his bluntnes, he writes, 
                                                
65
 Thornley, ?The Midle English Penitential Lyric,? 297. For the dating of the poem se Ellis?s notes to 
La Male Regle de T. Hocleve, in My Compleinte and Other Poems, 7; and Furnival, introduction to 
Hocleve?s Works: The Minor Poems, xi. 
66
 Knap states that in these lines, Hocleve reverses ?the causal sequence betwen coin and confesion, 
betwen poverty and penance.? Se ?Bureaucratic Identity,? 372. 
208 
The prouerbe is, the doumb man no lond getith. 
Whoso nat spekith and with neede is bete, 
And thurgh arghnese [cowardice] his owne self forgetith, 
No wondir, thogh anothir him forgete. (433-436) 
Hoccleve not only establishes the hierarchical relationship of the devotional lyrics and 
The Series, he also invokes the same system of reflexivity and exchange that he 
developed in ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin? and the ?Item de Beata Virgine,? a 
system in which the intercesor (here an earthly rather than a spiritual one) and the 
supplicant are locked in a mutualy dependent relationship predicated upon memory. 
More to the point, the intimate relationship between money and language, a relationship 
in which speech promises to aleviate need while silence promises to exacerbate it, is 
explicitly tethered to that reflexivity in La Male Regle. Here, the ?doumb man no lond 
getith? and the ?shameles crauour? (429) wil be rewarded with ?estat real? (430). 
 Like La Male Regle, Hoccleve?s speculum principum, the Regement of Princes, 
develops an economy of speech similar to that of the Marian lyrics and The Series, an 
economy in which, as Nicholas Perkins writes, ?Hoccleve must negotiate an exchange 
between his words and [a] hoped-for reward from Prince Henry.?
67
 Here, the terms of 
Hoccleve?s linguistic economy are primarily pecuniary rather than socialy or spiritual 
redemptive, but both the exchange of word for coin and the concomitant hierarchical 
flexibility are closely analogous. The terms of the Regement?s specific economy become 
clear when we consider a pasage near the conclusion of the poem in which Hoccleve 
laments that he is rapidly running out of poetic ideas. 
                                                
67
 Perkins, Counsel and Constraint, 39 
209 
More othir !ing, wolde I fayne speke & touche 
Heere in !is booke; but such is my dulnese ? 
for !at al voyde and empty is my pouche, ? 
"at al my lust is queynt with heuynese, 
And heuy spirit comaundith stilnese. 
And haue I spoke of pees, I schal be stile; 
God sende vs pees, if !at it be his wile. (5013-5019)
68
 
Antony Hasler notes that that Hoccleve here presents himself as a poet ?whose words 
are coins, profered in hope of some return?; the conflation of the monetary and the 
poetic is cemented by Hoccleve?s ?voyde and empty .. pouche,? a conceit that evokes 
?the silence encroaching on a weary body and a flagging tongue, a poet who has nothing 
more to say, nothing more to invest.?
 69
 But this pasage engages strikingly with the rest 
of Hoccleve?s work. Within the work?s petitionary mode, the empty pouch is not only 
emblematic of poetic and pecuniary exhaustion; it also becomes an image for the self-
reflexivity and the dependence upon circulation that we have observed in so much of 
Hocleve?s work, both secular and religious. Just as the Monk is granted heavenly and 
earthly reward for his speech to the Virgin Mary and just as Hoccleve himself is granted 
relief from his ?!ou!tful maladie? through dialogue and social intercourse, so the poet 
who offers linguistic currency from his pouch wil be rewarded with fiscal currency to 
put back into that pouch. It is the inter-circulation of coin and word here that gives both 
                                                
68
 Hocleve, The Regement of Princes, 181 
69
 Antony Hasler, ?Hocleve?s Unregimented Body,? Paragraph, 13 (190): 178-79. Se also Tolmie, 
?The Prive Scilence of Thomas Hocleve,? especialy p. 30-306. 
210 
things their value, the ability of poetic language to provide the money needed by the poet 
and the ability of money to provide the poetic language needed by the prince. 
Insofar as they are predicated upon the value that the word acrues as it circulates, 
the economies of speech in La Male Regle and The Regement of Princes are reflective of 
a wide cultural understanding that words can do work, that speech ? whether vocalized or 
poetic ? can act efectively upon the world around it. In ?The Monk Who Clad the 
Virgin,? spoken prayers clothe the Virgin and engender the young eclesiast?s salvation; 
in the ?Complaint of the Virgin,? the failure of speech brings sorrow to Mary while the 
recuperation of speech holds the promise of Christian redemption. Among the secular 
poems, Hoccleve?s Series shows verbal and poetic speech to be the means by which the 
poet recovers not only his sanity but his social position; both La Male Regle and The 
Regement of Princes develop economies in which words bring health and wealth to the 
poet. The eficacy of the spoken word in Hoccleve?s Marian lyrics is crucial to the 
poems? devotional contexts; as my analysis of Saint Erkenwald demonstrates, the 
performative potential of speech has important ramifications in late medieval religious 
culture. By developing similar models for the spoken word in his autobiographical and 
political works, Hoccleve indicates that ideals of performative speech are equaly 
applicable to secular arenas, that words have the ability to perform work not only for the 
church but for the crown. For no one is that fact more important than for the early kings 
of the Lancastrian dynasty. 
The struggle of the nascent Lancastrian dynasty to legitimate itself in the wake of 
Richard I?s deposition and subsequent murder is wel known. Strohm provides a 
particularly evocative acount of how both Henry IV and Henry V manipulated 
211 
chronicle-writing, writen prophesy, legal writing, public spectacle, and even gossip to 
strengthen their tenuous claim to the throne and to ?dominate their subjects? political 
imagination.? The Lancastrians even stoked English fears of the encroachment of 
Lollardy in order to cement their reputation as paragons of orthodox Christianity and the 
rightful heirs of the throne ?vacated? by Richard I. As Strohm explains, the first 
Lancastrian kings frequently enlisted poetic texts in their eforts to stabilize rule and 
dramatize their late transformation from nobles into kings: ?Fully implicated in the 
Lancastrian task of legitimating self-transformation was the Lancastrian poet. Long 
recognized as practitioners and exemplars of poetry as ?symbolic legitimation,? 
Lancastrian poets like Lydgate and Hoccleve moved wel beyond the frontiers of simple 
integration and into a zone of complex complicity.?
70
   
The question of Hoccleve?s ?complicity? in the Lancastrian project is stil a 
mater of debate; Strohm?s suggestion that Hoccleve was ?a royalist stooge? has lately 
met with increasing resistance by those who se both trenchant criticism and genuine 
advice simering beneath his apparent support of the Lancastrian cause.
71
 I contend, 
however, that the very question of Hoccleve?s complicity, with al of the moral and 
ethical implications that it drags behind it, is the wrong one to be asking. Whether 
Hoccleve was actively complicit, merely self-interested, or even subtly critical of 
                                                
70
 Strohm, England?s Empty Throne, 2, 141. Like Strohm, Derek Pearsal finds Hocleve to be complicit in 
Lancastrian designs of dynastic legitimation and reads the Regement of Princes as ?part of a larger program 
of kingly self-representation.? Se Derek Pearsal, ?Hocleve?s Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Royal 
Self-Representation,? Speculum 69 (194): 386; also Lary Scanlon, ?The King?s Two Voices: Narative 
and Power in Hocleve?s Regement of Princes,? Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-
1530, ed. Lee Paterson (Berkeley: University of California Pres, 190), 216-247. 
71
 The label is Tolmie?s, in ?Prive Scilence,? 282. Like Tolmie, both Knap and Judith Ferster object to the 
view that Hocleve unambiguously suported the Lancastrian dynastic cause. Se Knap, ?Bureaucratic 
Identity?; Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval 
England (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Pres, 196), especialy 137-159. Underlying both of 
these esays is David Lawton?s seminal reapraisal of fiftenth-century poetry, ?Dulnes and the Fiftenth 
Century,? English Literary History, 54 (1987): 761-799. 
212 
Lancastrian dynastic ambitions, what was realy important to the Lancastrians and their 
supporters was the work that words could do in helping to secure their throne, the ability 
of the spoken word, prayer, prophesy, or poem to make legitimate their royal claim. 
Whether Hoccleve?s poetry actualy did perform this dubious service for the house of 
Lancaster is a question that remains to be debated, but there can be no doubt that it 
provided a model for how such work could be transacted and demonstrated. In their 
idiosyncraticaly economic terms, Hoccleve?s poems demonstrate the performative 
potential of the word. But despite the persistence of economic and financial metaphors in 
Hoccleve?s poetry, in the final analysis we can se it moving towards a poetics that seks 
even to transcend economics, a poetics in which words themselves function to change the 
world around them, a poetics in which, as Lois Ebin writes, ?the poet?s words become a 
form of service to the state, a potent source of political ilusion making, rewarded and .. 
feared by monarchs.? As such, we might even imagine Hoccleve pointing toward a 
poetics where ?the poet?s language now acquires creative force? and ?the poet?s words, 
like the creative Word of God have the power to form a ?second nature.??
72
 In this sense, 
Hoccleve?s verse occupies a space where poetic spech not only clothes the Virgin, it 
crowns the King. 
 
 
                                                
72
 Lois A. Ebin, Iluminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fiftenth Century (Lincoln: University 
of Nebraska Pres, 198), 195-196. 
213 
EPILOGUE 
 
?Wyth hym there was a Plowman, was his brother?: 
The Two Plowmen and the Power of Spech 
 
 ?The Story of the Monk Who Clad the Virgin by Singing Ave Maria? has been al 
but ignored by contemporary critics anxious to dub Hoccleve England?s first 
autobiographical poet on the basis of the Series, the Regement of Princes and La Male 
Regle. The poem, it sems, was noticed litle more in its own time; it exists only in thre 
manuscripts, a slim number when we consider the eleven surviving witneses of 
Hoccleve?s ?Complaint of the Virgin,? the ten copies of the poet?s translation of Christine 
de Pizan?s ?L?Epistre de Cupide,? or the seven known manuscripts of the Series.
1
  
Nonetheles, ?The Monk Who Clad the Virgin? found a dubious second life in one mid-
fiftenth-century manuscript of the Canterbury Tales when it was recited by Chaucer?s 
most famously silent pilgrim, the Plowman.
2
 Introduced by a spurious link in which 
Hary Baily invites ?Ploughman Tylyer? to ?tele hys tale, as lot comyth aboute,? 
Hoccleve?s short paean to the Virgin rests uneasily between the tales of the Squire and 
the Second Nun, a straightforward exemplum of Marian devotion in the midst of 
Chaucer?s sometimes conflicting, often heterodox, always beguiling collection of tales.
3
 
                                                
1
 Se Boyd, ?Hocleve?s Miracle of the Virgin?; Elis?s introduction to Hocleve, ?My Compleinte? and 
Other Poems, vi-ix. 
2
 That manuscript is now known as Christ Church Oxford MS 152. Se Bowers, Introduction to ?The 
Ploughman?s Tale,? in Continuations and Additions, 24 
3
 Bowers, Continuations and Additions, 26 (l. 5-6). 
214 
 The compilers of the Christ Church manuscript might have had several reasons 
for including Hoccleve?s poem in Chaucer?s book. The simplest is that when they were 
faced with both a mute pilgrim and a few blank pages after the Squire?s Tale, they opted 
to fil both textual voids with a single poetic gesture. John Bowers, however, suggests 
that the asignment of the Tale to the Plowman rather than another silent pilgrim (one of 
the five guildsmen or the yeoman, for example) is itself significant: 
The plowman-figure had become the focus of considerable controversy 
beginning in the fourtenth century, acused by some preachers of 
opportunism during the labor shortage in the wake of the Black Death, 
praised by Wyclifite writers as the image of the ideal Christian .. By the 
mid-fiftenth century, the agents responsible for organizing the Christ 
Church manuscript of The Canterbury Tales apparently felt that even a 
mute Plowman was not altogether desirable .. Provided with a makeshift 
prologue fiting the work into the pilgrimage narative, [Hoccleve?s] 
rhyme-royal Miracle of the Virgin .. was placed in the mouth of the 
Plowman as a story of unimpeachable orthodoxy.
4
 
In light of the approximate dates of the manuscript in question (c. 1460-1470), the notion 
that Hoccleve?s ?Monk Who Clad the Virgin? was added to Chaucer?s work as a 
premptive defense against Wyclifism sems unlikely; while it lingered into the 1430s, 
the Lollard movement was efectively crushed by the suppresion of the Oldcastle 
rebelion of 1414, surviving only as a fringe movement at best.
5
 Moreover, by the time 
                                                
4
 Bowers, Continuations and Additions, 23-24. 
5
 Se Margaret Aston, Lolards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion 
(London: Hambledon Pres, 1984), especialy pages 35-48. 
215 
the Christ Church manuscript was compiled, the house of Lancaster was no longer an 
emergent dynasty using the fear of Wyclifism and the stringent enforcement of religious 
orthodoxy to solidify their position on the throne. Rather it was a dynasty struggling to 
reclaim its position at the head of the English state ? by 1461, Henry VI had himself been 
deposed by Edward IV, thus efectively ending Lancastrian rule and ushering in the even 
shorter-lived rule of the House of York.  
 What Bowers cals ?the subversive potential of the plowman as a spokesman for 
radical change? nonetheles loomed large in the fraught political and civic environment 
of the 1460s, and the insertion of Hoccleve?s overly orthodox miracle of the Virgin into a 
manuscript of the Canterbury Tales can be understood as an atempt on the part of the 
compliers to eliminate any taint of heterodoxy that clung the Plowman in particular and 
to Chaucer?s text more generaly. Indeed, such a move would not have been 
unwaranted: a manuscript of the Canterbury Tales (as wel as a manuscript of the Prick 
of Conscience) was produced as evidence in a 1464 heresy trial. Possibly, the owners of 
the Christ Church manuscript had good reason to inure themselves against similar 
acusations, thus the addition of the Hoccleve?s overtly orthodox poem. 
 But the ?Monk Who Clad the Virgin? was not the Plowman?s final word. In the 
1535-36 Thomas Godfray edition of the Canterbury Tales and again in the 1542 edition 
of Wiliam Thynne, Hary Baily once more invites the Plowman to join in the tale-teling 
contest, asking him to ?Come nere, and tel us some holy thynge.?
6
 This time, rather than 
responding with Hoccleve?s poem, the Plowman ofers the compaignye a debate between 
                                                
6
 ?The Plowman?s Tale? (l. 46) in Six Ecclesiastical Satires, ed. James Dean (Kalamazo, MI: Medieval 
Institute Publications, 192). Dean?s introduction to the tale provides a god overview of the its adition to 
Chaucer?s work and its continued inclusion in the Canterbury Tales into the eightenth century. Available 
at <htp:/ww.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/plwtlint.htm>. 
216 
a pelican and a grifin that advances a clear and unequivocal anti-Papist agenda. 
Suddenly, the sixtenth-century Plowman becomes the very eclesiastical reformer that 
was so feared in the fiftenth century. In ways analogous to the addition of Hoccleve?s 
Marian poem, the addition of a ?Lollard? Plowman?s Tale to Reformation-era editions of 
the Canterbury Tales makes abundant sense: following Henry VII?s oficial break with 
Rome in 1534, it became politicaly expedient for the ?Father of English Poesy? to be 
sen as ?an upright Wyclifian forbear? of Tudor Protestantism.
7
 This impulse toward a 
proto-Protestant Chaucer is particularly clear in Thynne?s edition of 1542. Dedicated to 
Henry VII himself, Thynne?s Canterbury Tales actualy places the anti-Catholic 
Plowman?s Tale imediately after the Parson?s Tale, thus giving the Wyclifite 
Plowman the last word in the Canterbury pilgrimage.
8
 By appending the spurious 
Plowman?s Tale to Chaucer?s complex work, both Godfray and Thynne, in efect, turn 
Chaucer into a good Tudor Protestant. 
 In this disertation, I have examined representations of speech in Middle English 
literature, focusing particularly on the work that the spoken word performs within that 
literature and how such work both reflects and acts upon its cultural environment. What I 
have located on a literary level, the Plowman?s Tale enacts on a textual level. Indeed, in 
the midst of the Wars of the Roses, when the houses of Lancaster and York were vying 
for control of the English throne, the addition of a tale of unimpeachable orthodoxy to a 
single manuscript efectively recontoured the outline of the Canterbury Tales as a whole, 
literaly creating a new text that comported with the religious and political sensibilities of 
the mid-fiftenth century. Les than a century later, during a period when, as Margaret 
                                                
7
 Aston, Lolards and Reformers, 210. 
8
 Se Dean, Six Eclesiastical Satires, introduction; Aston, Lolards and Reformers, 29. 
217 
Aston notes ?religious persecution was going on under the Act of Six Articles,? the 
addition of the Wyclifite Plowman?s Tale made appropriately Anglican the potentialy 
too-Catholic collection of tales.
9
 Insofar as our understanding of the historical Chaucer is 
necesarily mediated through his texts, we can even se the early compilers of the 
Canterbury Tales ? Catholic and Protestant alike ? as altering the figure of Chaucer 
himself, as making a new author by giving voice to his mute pilgrim. Thus, while we 
usualy imagine Chaucer creating and managing the often clamorous voices of the 
Canterbury pilgrims, the Plowman?s two tales show us that, in important ways, the voices 
of Chaucer?s pilgrims ? the ventriloquized speech of 30 imaginary travelers ? ultimately 
do the work of creating their author. Here, filtered through the gauzy haze of history, we 
can se the literary spoken word creating the world around it. 
 
                                                
9
 Aston, Lolards and Reformers, 29 
218 
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