MORTALITY AND IMAGINATION

Transcription

1 MORTALITY AND IMAGINATION

2 DISPUTATIO Editorial Board Dallas G. Denery II Bowdoin College Georgiana Donavin Westminster College Cary J. Nederman Texas A&M University Founding Editor Richard Utz Western Michigan University Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this book. VOLUME 12

3 MORTALITY AND IMAGINATION The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature by Kenneth Rooney H F

4 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rooney, Kenneth. Mortality and imagination : the life of the dead in medieval English literature. -- (Disputatio ; v. 12) 1. Dead in literature. 2. Immortality in literature. 3. Horror in literature. 4. English literature--middle English, History and criticism. I. Title II. Series 820.9'3548'0902-dc23 ISBN-13: , Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2011/0095/143 ISBN: Printed on acid-free paper

5 CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgements ix Author s Note xi List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction: Language, Tradition, and the Birth of the Dead 1 Chapter 1: Vile Bodies: The Cultural Life of the Corpse 33 Chapter 2: The Progress of the Dead: From Body to Revenant 101 Chapter 3: Farewell to the Flesh: Disembodying the Dead 141 Chapter 4: Grave Concerns: The Complaint of the Buried Body 181 Chapter 5: Romancing the Macabre: The Three Dead and their Legacy 203 Chapter 6: Death, Apostrophe: Embodying Death 225 Chapter 7: Dancing with Death: The Danse Macabre 253 Conclusion (Epitaph): A Handful of Dust 271 Bibliography 277 Index 297

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7 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Plate 1, p. 21. Giovanni Buffalmacco, Trionfo della Morte (detail, Legend of the Three Living and Three Dead), mid-fourteenth century. Pisa, Campo Santo. Photo SCALA, Florence. Plate 2, p. 22. Take hede unto my figure here abowne, first half of fifteenth century. British Library, MS Additional 37049, fol. 32 v. The British Library Board. Plate 3, p. 23. The Disputation betwixt the Body and Worms, first half of fifteenth century. British Library, MS Additional 37049, fol. 35 r. The British Library Board. Plate 4, p. 24. Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, London area, c Psalter of Robert de Lisle, British Library, MS Arundel 83 II, fol. 127 r. The British Library Board. Plate 5, p. 25. Legend of the Three Living and Three Dead (detail, the dead), fourteenth century, mural. Raunds, Northamptonshire. Photo courtesy of Anne Marshall. Plate 6, p. 25. Legend of the Three Living and Three Dead (detail, the living), fourteenth century, mural. Raunds, Northamptonshire. Photo courtesy of Anne Marshall. Plate 7, p. 26. Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead (detail, the living), early fourteenth century. Taymouth Hours, British Library, MS Yates Thompson 13, fol. 179 v. The British Library Board. Plate 8, p. 27. Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead (detail, the dead), early fourteenth century. Taymouth Hours, British Library, MS Yates Thompson 13, fol. 180 r. The British Library Board.

8 viii Illustrations Plate 9, p. 28. Jean and Bourgot Le Noir, Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MS Cloisters Inv , fol. 322 r. SCALA, Florence. Plate 10, p. 28. Deathbed scene, with vado mori, fifteenth century. British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B. vi. II, fols 1 v 2 r. The British Library Board. Plate 11, p. 29. Crowned figure of Death, French, mid-fifteenth century. British Library, MS Egerton 1070, fol. 53 r. The British Library Board.

9 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is a book not about death, but the dead, and their literary, rhetorical, and imaginative conception in a particular historical moment (the late Middle Ages) and a particular vernacular (Middle English). There has long been a need for a book-length literary history of the dead in the late medieval English period. Philippa Tristram s innovative and rewarding Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (1976) offers two chapters devoted to the theme of death in an expansive reading of nature, life, transience, death, and eschatology in medieval literature in English. The present study, though focused on figures of death, as it were, seeks more models for the dead in a greater number of texts and offers wider generic contexts too than the important studies of death in particular genres of the past four decades, to which this study is gratefully indebted: Rosemary Woolf s magisterial The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages; Douglas Gray s Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric, and Takami Matsuda s Death and Purgatory in Medieval Didactic Literature. Any book on death must range widely in its cultural materials, and the great books of the international medieval culture and art of death of the last three decades those of T. S. R. Boase, Philippe Ariès, Michael Camille, and Paul Binski have furnished both the model for, and the conviction of the desirability of, a study devoted to the implications of this universal theme in a particular vernacular. This, then, is a book of the dead for medieval English writing, but in its widest cultural contexts; social, material, imaginative, religious, and iconographic, and it participates in new lines of enquiry opened up by the innovative literary histories of the revenant in medieval Latinity offered by Jean-Claude Schmitt s Ghosts in the Middle Ages, and the work of Nancy Caciola. This study of the dead began life as a doctoral dissertation undertaken with the support of a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Research Scholarship. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the awarding body, the Irish Research Council

10 x Acknowledgements for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Publication of this book has been generously funded by the College of Arts, Celtic Studies, and Social Sciences of University College Cork, Ireland. I would also like to thank all those who have helped shape this study in its final form. Margaret Connolly supervised the original dissertation submitted to the National University of Ireland and supported it ceaselessly in its afterlife. John Thompson examined the original thesis; Derek Pearsall, Martha Driver, Dallas Denery, and Sophie Oosterwijk read the whole draft book at varying stages, and Vincent Gillespie and Juliet Mullins read draft chapters of the book. Elizabeth Williams and Felicity Riddy offered kind advice. The delegates of the conference series in medieval romance and the Early Book Society have provided friendly platforms for the tentative airing of my research over the years. For their shared scholarship I am grateful, and all remaining errors and omissions in this book are my own. In the field of medieval art, Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh has pointed out instances of macabre medieval iconography in Italy, and Anne Marshall has generously supplied me with images of the Legend of the Three Living and Three Dead at Raunds, Northamptonshire, from her remarkable database of English medieval parochial art at I would also like to thank the staff of the library at University College Cork, the British Library, London, and SCALA Archives, London. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my friends, colleagues, and mentors in the School of English: in particular, Andrew King and Professor Emeritus Éamonn Ó Carragáin, with whom I have discussed matters morbid and medieval to my great profit for many years. Alan Foley, Carrie Griffin, and Richard Hawtree have been generous with their learning in conversation. Seán Ó Duinnshléibhe, from the Department of Modern Irish, responded to questions on Irish writing on my behalf, and Professors Graham Allen, Lee Jenkins, and James Knowles have done much to promote the culture of research in the School of English, which helped to see this book completed. At Brepols, I would like to thank Simon Forde, commissioning editor, for his patience and faith in the project, and Dallas Denery, Cary Nederman, and Richard Utz for accepting the title into the Disputatio series. The production and editorial team at Brepols have been an unfailing delight to work with, and I would like to thank Guy Carney and Claire Mabey for answering flurries of questions for me, Valerie Mobley for her assistance in preparing the files for editing, and Heather M. Padgen for her careful copyediting. This book is for both my parents, and is dedicated to the memory of my father. Ken Rooney May 2010

11 AUTHOR S NOTE Extracts from primary texts are from the editions cited, though I do not always reproduce the editorial emendations as they appear in the sources cited and replace (in quotations from later Middle English, but not earlier Middle or Old English) all runic characters with their modern equivalents.

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13 ABBREVIATIONS BL British Library, London BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris EETS Early English Text Society e.s. extra series o.s. original series s.s. supplementary series JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology JRSAI Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland Manual A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, , ed. by J. B Severs, A. E. Hartung, and Peter Beidler, 11 vols to date (New Haven: Archon, 1957 ) MLN Modern Language Notes MLQ Modern Language Quarterly PMLA Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America PRIA Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy RES Review of English Studies SEL The South English Legendary, ed. by Charlotte D Evelyn and Anna J. Mill, EETS, o.s., 235, 236, 244, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, ) YLS Yearbook of Langland Studies

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