the culture of europe in the later middle ages

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The Culture of Europe in the Later Middle Ages Author(s): Miri Rubin Source: History Workshop, No. 33 (Spring, 1992), pp. 162-175Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289146Accessed: 20-03-2015 03:56 UTC

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A Corpus Christi procession

The Culture of Europe in the Later Middle Ages* by Miri Rubin

Cultural exchange, is this a tautology? Is there any type of exchange which is not cultural, is there any culture which is not always in a state of exchange? To ask these questions is to suggest that we must reflect on our notions of culture, and our understanding of the conitours and intensity of exchange in the medieval world. Whereas culture used to be considered the domain of learning, power, officialdom, the church, we now speak of cultures, of complex and interesting interactions between areas within a culture; and we subdivide cultulre for the sake of convenience into popular, urban, female, clerical, trying to say thus that there is a plenitude of possibilities within the framework of shared symbols which we nonetheless would like to maintain as culture. As to exchange, we seek it now not only within and between burgeoning towns, or in the recesses of barter communities and customary exchanges of gifts sometimes between friends and equals, other times between dependents and would-be benefactors. We seek exchanges in unlikely places, at the convergence of regional economies, highlighting the complex fits which medieval people were able to identify and seek to fill in their economic activities. To talk about culture and exchange, and to talk about culture as exchange, is to recognise that the project which animated so much historical work inl recent decades, that broadening of horizons sometimes known as the 'new history', has also spurred us to acknowledge the variety of experiences, needs, aspirations, capacities which coexisted within the social world of the Middle Ages. Having granted the privilege of historical weight to women as well as men, peasants as well as landlords, artisans as well as great merchants, the poor parish priest as well as the

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The Culture of Europe 163

bishop and theologian, having followed complex methodological and procedural strategies in order to bring into the historical light a hitherto submerged world of differing groups, their struggles and their collabor- ations, we find that the terms which have habitually been used to describe their worlds, as well as the means by which this diversity actually worked through cooperation, negotiation, resistance or deference, need to be reconsidered. So, first came the making visible of work, marriage, death, consumption, the bringing into history of a diverse social body, and next, that is now, the interpretation of the differing worlds of these people, worlds which coexisted and interrelated. Making sense of medieval society without losing the sense of difference and variety within it is the challenge. How to acknowledge the difference from us; the difference from each other of the young and old, the men and women, the powerful and the weak, the northern and the southern, the peasant and the knight, the guildsman and the day-labourer, without cloaking them in a robe of piety (medieval religion) on the one hand, or imputing to them agendas of social change (feminist, classist) which are perhaps anachronistic? While acknowledging that these people in some important way understood each other, shared a meaningful cultural world, how to bring to light the fact that they often did so as opponents, resentful underlings, frustrated wives or doubting parishioners? This is a challenge which faces not only the medieval historian, it is one which lies at the very heart of any democratic inquiry: how to give people an equal weight and importance, and yet acknowledge their differing positions, aspirations and capabilities?

To envisage Europe as any sort of cultural entity is a problem which demands a particular imaginative and conceptual predisposition. It means that we privilege certain types of activities over others: that we consider that the fact that Italy and England entertained vastly varying demographic regimes was less important that the fact that Latin was the universal language of learning; it requires that Bohemia, Scotland, Lithuania, the Baltic be relegated to only marginal membership in this entity; it means that we prefer thinking of Europe as a great commercial system, one whose sophistication made financial and commercial handbooks as indispensable a tool to the medieval merchant, as a train or flight-schedule is to the European businessman today.1 To think of a medieval Europe is to concentrate on exchange, communication and interdependence, rather than on those elements that are local, divergent and inimical. This is probably what we should be doing today as we edge nearer to the challenge that 1992 presents, and as the EC Council of Ministers is faced with a rush of new applications for membership in the community from countries whose medieval adherence to Europe is questionable to say the least. Perhaps ultimately, Europe is a collective fantasy of great strength, one which became enshrined and inscribed in institutions: the Church, the papacy, the order of Hospitallers, the Hanseatic League, the Bardi Company, the routes to Compostella, Venetian diplomacy, antisemitism, the Mass. And today


164 History Workshop Journal

more than ever it seems to be, as Christopher Marlowe called it: 'infinite riches in a little room'.

So to talk about Cultural Exchange is to admit that culture possesses certain communicative, exchangeable elements, which make it valuable and useful within and between groups. It is also perhaps to say that exchanges of any sort must always take place within a field of culture: that trade and armies tread the same routes as pilgrims, that they can be moved by similar symbols, that an idea of trust within a European commonwealth was the very basis for exchange, but that at its root lay something cultural, to do with meaning and self-understanding. That so many activities in the medieval world broke out and away from a European matrix: that Italian merchants traded with Arabs, that African slaves reared Italian babies, that Hanseatic trade depended sometimes on the protection of still pagan war-lords of Lithuania, that Jews and Arabs and Christians still co-existed in a tense commonwealth in Spain, all these strain our notion of the European cultural sphere of exchanges. But perhaps the true nature of its culture cannot be measured through the facts of trade or even the rude reality of political alliances, perhaps it is, as I have suggested, a transcendent notion - somewhat cosmological, metaphysical - which offered a matrix for placing the local in a larger world of meaning. This sphere was inhabited and traversed most frequently by the powerful, but it also pervaded more popular conceptions of identity in the world.

* * *

To Margery Kempe, born at Lynn in Norfolk (c. 1373 - after 1438), one of the most famous and exasperating women of the fifteenth century, Europe was a rich treasure-trove, a jewel-box, and the jewels within were the relics of Christ's body.2 Especially precious were those relics of his Passion which were not easy to come by in England; and the most precious were signs and tokens of Christ's body, the ever renewed flesh and blood of the Eucharist. After two long and arduous pilgrimage trips - the first in 1413-14 to the Holy Land and Rome, the second in 1417 to Compostella - in 1433, at the age of 60, soon after the death of her son, Margery embarked on her third and last trip, to Brandenburg (Prussia), to visit the Holy Blood of Wilsnack. She was accompanied by a young German woman, her recently widowed daughter- in-law, who was returning to her homeland and to the child she and her husband had left there with friends for the duration of their visit to England.3 The passage from Ipswich to Danzig was a harsh one, and by its end Margery had fallen out with her young relative. So they separated, and Margery remained alone in Danzig, a weak and bizarre old woman, not sure what to do next. She accepted an invitation from a man, John, to travel on pilgrimage to Wilsnack. Wilsnack had become one of the great centres of late medieval pilgrimage, after a miracle in 1383 which saw the preservation of three consecrated Hosts within the remains of an altar in a church destroyed by fire. The devotion was encouraged by papal indulgences, and



by the taste for eucharistic relics.4 So they journeyed first by boat to Stralsund, and then by foot to Wilsnack. Her peculiar ways and habitual crying so exasperated her companion that at times he would mischievously speed up his pace to annoy her. For parts of the journey, just before reaching Wilsnack, she was carried on a bier. The jewel-box was opened on a particularly auspicious day, for Margery's journey brought her to Wilsnack in the octave of Corpus Christi, when a eucharistic procession displaying the precious relic was mounted.5 It was so attractive an event that she could hardly find a place to lie down and rest, the inns surrounding Wilsnack being full with visitors and pilgrims like herself. The knowledge of Christ, the desire to view his blood meant that Wilsnack became an intimate place, the distance from Lynn to it seemed to shrink by power of its promise. Margery, unworldly and untutored in so many other ways, became a seasoned and swift traveller spurred by her powerful purpose. She also travelled on pilgrimages in England, to the northern shrines in York and to St John of Bridlington (d. 1379) in 1413 and 1417.6 Her Europe was part of an understanding of her relationship with Christ, product of many good sermons, and the stories of saints and miracles. It was particularly important to Margery to attest this Holy Blood. Viewing another phial of Holy Blood, that held at Hales Abbey in Gloucestershire, had become in the nervous years of the early fifteenth century, a sign of orthodoxy, against accusations of Lollardy. Within it were enfolded the acceptance of pilgrimage, of sacrament, of the orthodox manifestations of salvation and worship. To the woman who was brought to trial seven times in her life for suspicion of heresy, this was an attractive and suitably extravagant achievement. The desire to partake in this European symbol of orthodoxy spurred Margery to travel; it made England too small for her, and made Europe beckon, seem accessible. She suffered appalling conditions, terrifying passages by sea, cold and sickness, she was infested with vermin which modesty kept her from washing away. But she travelled, not in the spirit of exotic exploration, curiosity and discovery, but quite the opposite. As a traveller with a sense of intimacy and relevance, Margery, an old woman, a solitary pilgrim, came to Wilsnack.

* * *

Jan Hus (c. 1373-1415) was burnt following the condemnation of his views as heretical by the Council of Constance in 1415. He had been invited to Constance by Emperor Sigismund in 1414 and was promised safe conduct and an open discussion of his views about church hierarchy and liturgy, but he was soon arrested and finally condemned for heresy and put to death by the secular arm. He also supported Utraquism, the practice of communion by the laity in both species, the bread and the wine, a practice which had spread in Bohemia as the very epitome of the critique of clerical privilege, of the cry for reform of lay piety, and for the replacement of the established ecclesiastical hierarchy. The tale of Hus's life and death was the outcome of



a very singular cultural exchange. His vision of the Church as the body of those touched by grace and destined to be saved - past, present and future - had been inspired by the writings of an Englishman, John Wyclif, texts which received radical interpretations by followers, Wycliffites, who also popularised them, to produce that very English brand of late medieval heresy, Lollardy.7

So the views of an English scholar and his followers became the treasured blue-prints for a movement of national, religious, intellectual and social renewal at the other side of Europe, in Bohemia. It is moving to read of a pilgrimage made by two Czech followers of Wyclif to his tomb at Lutterworth (Leicestershire) in 1406, and of the legend that they chipped pieces off the venerable tomb to take home to the Czech Wycliffites. By the 1390s Wyclif's writings had spread to many European centres of learning: his works on optics, on dominion, his treatise on the Eucharist. These writings were to be expunged and excoriated in some quarters, but copied and upheld by others: among the Czech theologians of the university of Prague they took root, destined to move people, armies, popes.8

From the mid-fourteenth century, with the coming together of King of Bohemia and German Emperor in the person of Charles IV, Bohemia had been integrated into the Empire as the heart and base of a German polity. It was flooded by Germans in government, church and in the newly founded Caroline university. Bohemian displeasure was made apparent in the internal politics of the university, where the Czech student body, the Czech natio, mounted intellectual and political resistance to the men of the three imperial nations: the Saxons, the Poles and the Bavarians. The Bohemian gentry rose in 1394 against King Wenceslas, and when the imperial Electors removed their approval, and he retained the sole title of King of Bohemia, some possibilities for realignment were in the air. The Czech intellectuals and reformers, the leaders who had the support of a local gentry and the burgesses of Prague, found in Wyclif's writings a political theory which suited their evangelical ideas of reform and their aspirations for a Bohemian polity under a virtuous king. They called first on Wenceslas and then on Emperor Sigismund, to correct abuses with all the power that Wyclif accorded to the dominium civile. To wrest power away from the imperial clergy and papal intervention and to sustain a purified ministry over a corrected people was the aim, and it called for redefinition of the differentials in religious access which separated lay and cleric. This demand was articulated through a critique of religious practices which were clearly open to the rich and not to the poor such as private masses, almsgiving and pilgrimages (Hus was particularly vehement in his criticism of the fashionable cult of the Holy Blood of Wilsnack and the Synod of Prague of 1405 forbad travel to it altogether). In the hands of other thinkers, such as Matthew of Janov, reform was inspired through an inversion of clerical privilege around its most central symbol, the Eucharist. He recommended that the laity communicate daily, like priests, and receive communion in


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I The Culture of Europe 167

both kinds, like priests. His notion of Utraquism was a clear departure from Wyclif's eucharistic notions, and one which had a particular resonance in the Bohemian context.

So a reading of Wyclif and Wycliffites in Bohemia developed their ideas in quite new ways. Cultural exchange and the movement of manuscripts between Bohemia and England had grown through the mediation of the knights in the entourage of Anne of Bohemia, who followed her to England when she became Richard II's queen. Hus began the copying of Wyclif's work at the University of Prague in 1398, and by 1402 he was appointed preacher at the Bohemian movement's chapel in Prague, Bethlehem, a stage from which his views could be expounded. Wyclif's philosophical realism, and his political theory, gave the Bohemian movement an intellectual rigour, a programme out of which a people's church could be conceptual- ised. To them Wyclif's subtle reformulation of the Aristotelian analysis of the Eucharist in terms of remanence, opened the door to far deeper challenges to the sacramental system.9 Ideas nurtured at Oxford under the patronage of John of Gaunt and sections of the court, found much popularity among poor scholars and unbeneficed English clergy, and became in Bohemia intellectual and political tools with which Roman orthodoxy was to be attacked, and order and hierarchy challenged.10 Following a laborious process of study, commentary and interpretation, the concepts which held together a wide-spread Bohemian alliance were forged, ideas which came to merit discussion even in the highest forums of the Church (like the Council of Constance), and whose logic could recruit forces which would stand up to imperial armies.11 Ideas nurtured in the late medieval English culture travelled a long road to shape the religious and political language within which the Bohemian polity and the Christian Church could be transformed.12

* * *

Around 1461 a play was enacted in Croxton, Norfolk. It has come down to us in a single manuscript. It is known as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. 13 It is a delightful comedy containing some of the best of medieval slapstick, the sort of play which people in villages as well as towns were used to and were able to enjoy in the fifteenth century. It tells of a Christian merchant, Aristorius, who procured the Host from a church and sold it to a Jew, Jonathas, for ?20. The latter went on to test the Host in a parody of clerical consecration. He wounded it, buffeted, scourged and beat it, then immolated it in an oven, from which Christ ultimately arose in a mock resurrection. A miracle was enacted on stage. The miracle called forth witnesses, amongst them a bishop who worked the miracle in reverse, returning the Host to its normal shape, and who received the converted Jew into the bosom of the Christian faith, while the whole assembly of Christians and Jews paraded in procession singing the feast's hymn 0 sacrum convivium. The play represents a version of a myth which emerged in


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European culture in the last decade of the thirteenth century, but which spread vigorously throughout Europe: the Host desecration tale. This story emerges in the late thirteenth century following its enactment in Paris in 1290, where a Jew, Jonathan, was accused of procuring a Host from a Christian woman, abusing it with a knife, and then throwing it into a cauldron of boiling water, only to see it bleed. The miracle was discovered, the Jew punished with death, many Jews converted and the miraculous Host was joyfully taken to the parish church."4 The tale of Host desecration entered into the major collections of religious tales and sermons, was represented in visual art, and enacted in plays such as the Jeu de la Sainte Hostie, or in the Italian play Del miracolo del Corpo di Cristo."5 Now the story told in these plays is a literary representation of a narrative which not only captured the imagination of late medieval people, but also moved them to violence. The Host desecration accusation, side by side with the myth of ritual murder, was a tale of inexorable force when retold in local contexts, as accusations unfolded and were enacted into pogroms. The Host desecration accusation was an elaboration of all the fears, desires, and doubts which resided around the Eucharist, and more generally, within the story of salvation. It showed how very vulnerable Christ's body was, how easily it could fall into the wrong hands and be derided, how available and exposed it was (not least because of its public exposition, such as at Wilsnack, the scene which Margery Kempe had rushed to visit). The Host desecration narrative had a double life: one fairly benign in the pockets of preachers and adorning painted panels; and another enacted in reality providing the lines to real actors who accused real Jews of having perpetrated the crime, actors who threw these Jews into real fires, robbed real Jewish houses and claimed veritable miracles to be worked by the miraculously unscathed Hosts.

Now, fifteenth-century England was free of Jews, but it was not free of fears of their contaminating, ridiculing, sacrilegious threat. Cultural exchange meant that English preachers possessed tales about Jews, like the one just mentioned. They read them, saw them in miniatures and could disseminate them to such a degree that English parishioners, like those of fifteenth-century Kirton-in-Lindsey in Lincolnshire, even encountered it depicted on the walls of their village church.16 What is extremely important is that the English Play of the Sacrament told the Host desecration tale in a way quite different from the Continental tale. Not because the English were nicer or more tolerant, but because this particular cultural good - the Host desecration accusation against Jews - could not elicit the same type of interpretation as it did on the Continent. The images of Jew and Host carried different symbolic valences in fifteenth-century Norfolk than they did in fifteenth-century Florence or Paris. In the Croxton Play the narrative is driven by a comic logic. It is full of detailed and emphatic stage directions, it is full of theatrical tricks: in the scene when the Jew tries to throw the Eucharist into the oven while Jewish accomplices stoke the fire, the Host cleaves to the Jew's hand drawing him towards the oven. When his friends



try to help him they nail the Host to the wall in order to pull the Jew's hand away, in what can only be seen as a mock, inverted crucifixion. The Jewish hand comes off with the Host, but is ultimately restored. In producing such powerful parodic drama, in working theatricality to its fullest, the play not only demonstrates the obvious and un-deniable truth of the Eucharist (through its constant miraculous transformation), but also cleverly con- fronts high-minded Lollard objections to theatricality. It rebuts the claim that drama sows confusion in people's minds by representing lofty subjects through mundane and profane images and persons.17 Jews are not the subject of the Croxton Play, its dramatic force is not fuelled by the desire to punish and avenge the desecration of Christ's body, it is not phobic. Rather, the story, once received in England, is transformed and remade into a story about eucharistic truth, a story of forgiveness and inclusion. The story now emphasises the simplicity and plasticity of the Eucharist offered to humanity, while unshakeably supporting its divinity, in fact taking it to be obvious. Why, even the Jew comes to believe in the end; perfect one-upmanship in face of Norfolk Lollards who insisted on doubting what was all too true. We witness here a form of cultural exchange and circulation through participation in a literary world, a world of religious instruction, exchange which none the less could produce some very different interpretations and uses of the same cultural artifact - in this case the Host desecration narrative. I would like to suggest that this changing and reorientation of meanings, even within a shared cultural field, is the very essence of all cultural processes. To talk about cohesion within the cultural sphere is perhaps not to talk about shared meaning, but rather varied uses of shared symbols, narratives, artifacts.

* * *

If exchange and communication lie at the very heart of any culture, its field is defined by the collective fantasy of belonging, trust and identity within that culture. Notions of identity which suggested the otherness of Jews and Muslims were also bolstered by the sense that the shared culture was coterminous with the realm of civilisation, and that outside it lay treachery, danger, monstrous and exotic beings. Maps of the world represent this sense. Some maps placed the known countries of Europe and the Mediterranean onto the bodily form of Christ, while those in the Mappa mundi tradition nurtured the images of Sir John de Mandeville's Travels and thus fed the minds of Europeans throughout the fifteenth century: one-eyed people, many-headed people, cannibals, strangely proportioned and alien peoples. And yet some of them were strangely near, otherwise why send ambassadors to them, as Henry IV did in 1400 when he sent a letter to the legendary Prester John, hoping for collaboration in a revived crusading mission. The embassy ended up in Ethiopia, where Christians lived. But only a little beyond lay the lands beyond cultural exchange, even if these



were the lands where Venetians and Genoese did business: lands whose ivories, spices, and people, were commodities for European consumption.

This vision would have Christian Europe as the world, a network of different, competing and yet reassuring related communities. Finding out their origins became a major fifteenth-century preoccupation. Some were satisfied with the reassuring merit conferred by the common civilising faith. But others, notably Italian humanists, were constructing interesting ways in which to conceptualise and justify the sense of difference between Europe and the rest of the world, in the face of on-going exchange and impending military successes of the Turks in Eastern Europe. Theorising a hierarchy of existence, a ladder of human communities, was a dangerous preoccupation: it could provide legitimation for authoritarian rule within republics, but it also created all the justifications which would be needed for the exploitation of the peoples encountered at the very end of the century in the New World.18

* * *

Notions of hierarchy are important issues in as much as they can enhance or retard the conditions of exchange, the ability to cooperate and to strike useful alliances. Moving from England, through France, through the Italian towns, through some German principalities, into Hungary and Poland, through the Baltic to Norway, a large degree of similarity would be encountered by the traveller. Merchant, pilgrim or artist would be passing through monarchies or republics which had balanced systems of government with representative assemblies, what Sir John Fortescue called in his Governance of England of the 1470s: dominium politicum et regale. Notions of a popular sovereignty delegated to God-chosen royal lineages formed the prevailing understanding of power, legitimacy, order and duty. Philippe Pot, a Burgundian Deputy of the Estates General which assembled at Tours in 1484 during a royal minority could describe thus the creation of a regency council: 'the people must resume a power which is their own'. 9 The traveller on business would also note that these systems of authority were many- tiered, from constables and churchwardens, through county courts or town-courts, to the echelons of government identified with the commonwealth or the common good: king and parliament, or ruling patrician council. Travellers would find familiar the modes in which power operated, even if foreigners could sometimes find themselves in very sticky situations without protector or friend. But artists and merchants were never alone.

They would pine for their home, and reckon that their country's landscape was the fairest, its women loveliest, its climate most temperate, and its government most just. But that is the way of the human imagination. Yet there was a reassuring familiarity in Europe located in certain similar symbols: of majesty, of divinity, of fellowship, which would be familiar and create a basis for exchange. Facets of social organisation would strike the travelling person as universal. Think of women: at work in fields and



workshops, in kitchens and gardens, tending the sick, just as the traveller saw them back home. And he might find it reassuring to know that whatever the foreign place, if he wished to make advances or pay respects to a woman, a father, a brother, or a brother-in-law was to be approached, since a woman, even a widow with some life experience, dwelt under the tutelage of men. This is not to say that a great variety in the effective functioning of women did not exist throughout Europe: there were vast differences in access to work, size of family, age at marriage, household structure, all of which made being a woman quite a different thing in Florence and in York.20 But the collective fantasy about women was very similar: so much so that besides the fine-tuning of local colour and custom, which a clever artist or merchant could pick up quickly, he could guess his way pretty well within the rituals and conceits of courtship and love.

And yet, at another level of representation, we can detect a subtler differentiation in the misogyny which underpinned so much of the relations between the sexes. A debate rocked the literary circles of early fifteenth- century Europe, this time a debate in French, about the depictions of women in popular romance. This is the celebrated Querelle de la rose, initiated by Christine de Pisan (1363-1429x34), the foremost woman of letters who followed her father into the service of Charles V of France. She had married a courtier who died young and left her a widow at 25. She lived the rest of her life as a single mother, working at her writing for her family's support. Christine initiated the Querelle in 1399 with her EpUtre au dieu d'amours. Christine lamented the injustice done to women in the popular literature of her day. She singled out the most widely known romance, the French allegorical poem the Roman de la Rose written by Guillaume de Lorris c. 1237 and then continued by Jean de Meun c. 1275-80. The poem was translated into other European vernaculars in the fourteenth century. Now the Roman de la Rose uses a wide range of source material, and it is encyclopaedic in its recycling of the stories of love and seduction, lost honour and suicides told by the great poets of antiquity like Ovid and Virgil, as well as patristic writers, and more recent sages such as Alan of Lille and John of Salisbury. In the second part of the poem, the tales are interspersed with a poisonous anti-feminist vitriol. All women are made into either ugly and cunning or beautiful and wounding creatures, and the only way to treat them is with deceit, so as never to fall into their hands: they are to be seduced and discarded. This venomous position in the Rose section of Jean de Meun made him the target for Christine's attacks. The patristic and clerical tradition provided mixed legacies: the deep suspicion, even hatred, of women of a Tertullian, the youthful misogyny of a Chrysostom, or the compromising acceptance of marriage and sexuality of an Augustine.21 There was a courtly tradition in which the love-object was given little personality, but was wrapped in fantasy of virtue, acquiescence, beauty, chastity. The extreme elaborations of this tradition could produce the disembodied (although sometimes treated stylistically as a female virtue)



Christine de Pisan presenting her work to Louis d'Orleans.

love-object, Reason, as the only worthy object of trust and love in a sinful world.22 And there were martyred women whom patristic writers could set forth as edifying figures.23 But romance also incorporated the bawdy and ridiculous satire of the fabliaux in which women were not only nags and hags, but lustful temptresses, and only too willing partners in adultery and other offences and deceits. The Roman de la Rose boasts of men's exploits as seducers and then betrayers of women and it is peppered with speeches and declarations about women's fickleness, their lasciviousness: an orgy of misogynistic indulgences, in the most popular vernacular poem of the Middle Ages. Christine took up her eloquent pen and wrote against this. She quarrelled with the Rose and with those who enjoyed such literature and yet failed to see the pain and insult which it inflicted on women. She marshalled great examples of constancy and virtue: the Virgin, female martyrs, heroines of antiquity, which she developed into Le livre de la cit des dames, completed in 1405. The debate continued in an exchange of letters with Jean de Montreuil (Provost of Lille) and Gontier and Pierre Col; but on

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her side were moralists as well as cultivated men of court such as Jean Gerson and Jean de Boucicaut, the Marshal of France, and Nicolas of Clamanges.

Christine had an ally in her complaint - Geoffrey Chaucer. She probably was not fully aware of him as such, even though he had become quite famous by the time of his death in 1400, a year after the beginning of the Querelle. A contemporary of Chaucer had embarked in the 1360s upon a translation of the Roman, to produce the earliest of the three fragments now known as the English Romaunt of the Rose.25 Chaucer was at once a fine judge of literary taste and fashionable opinion, and the most original subverter of pieties as well as prejudice through his irony, keener than any knife. In his Legend of Good Women Chaucer himself attempted to extol the virtues of female martyrs of love, rather than to revel in the seduction and betrayal of their trust. Neither Chaucer nor the translators of sections of the Roman into English (still held by some to have been Chaucer himself!) had approached this most famous of European poems, written in the language of European polite secular society, as enslaved provincials. They submitted to the workings of cultural exchange, or interpretation, as we have already seen other users of European symbols and texts do.26 The Romaunt includes the first half of Guillaume's poem, and two extracts of Jean's work. It steers away from the most misogynistic passages of Jean's continuation. We know that Chaucer considered the French style of denigration of women and extolling of duplicitous amorous conquest to be something in the way of a 'French disease'.27 Neither his inclination nor his sense of his audience allowed the translator to include those hateful lines, which would have been so painful to Christine, in the English version of the Rose. So the English knew a Rose by the same name, but which was indeed not the same Rose. Within the European-Christian culture of misogyny there were some strikingly familiar themes, and yet the experience of it must have been different in England and in France.

Thomas Hoccleve (c. 1368-1430), long-standing clerk of the privy-seal and poet extraordinaire, contributed to the debate in his own way. He chose to translate Christine's Epitre in his 476 line long verse Letter of Cupid, of 1402.28 Hoccleve was very loyal to Christine's poem, although he shortened here or there and dropped references to famous Gallic seducers whom the English audience simply would not have known. The wit of Christine's defence of women comes through loud and clear:

In general we wole pat yee knowe iat ladyes of honur and reverence, And othir gentil wommen han, I-sowe, Swich seed of conpleynte in our audience Of men pat doon hem outrage & offense. Pat it oure eres greeueth for to heere, So pitous is theffect of hir mateere.29



It is realistic and bawdy, and yet serious and balanced. It even puts forward the theory of the Fortunate Fall, not only exculpating Eve for responsibility for Adam's temptation, but even explaining that it was a happy choice, a felix culpa. So misogyny, one of the powerful ideas of medieval European culture, also had divergent forms and formulations: it was familiar to all, and yet specific in articulation, in its contextual construction, in the lived experiences which it produced. As cultural material was exchanged (and nothing turned round faster than a good French romance), cultural artifacts and symbols were wrought and remade, interpreted in grids of meaning which were embedded in local experience and in the varieties of languages, and power, which communities and individuals experienced.

This allows us to reiterate what has been emerging as my main point - that the sense of contact and sharing within a cultural entity is a highly brittle and circumstantial experience. To move within medieval Europe with ease, as the executive traveller does in today's Europe, was to be able to function within a semiotic field: to enter a church, a market, to view a procession, to attend a Mass, to decode the messages of hierarchy at court or assembly, and to feel that these were familiar activities which could be made sense of and which reassuringly conjured experiences from one's own background. At least sufficiently so to induce trust and intimacy, which facitated exchange, alliances, cooperation. Yet, in important ways this was an illusion, and one which was fabricated and perpetuated to facilitate that very exchange, that happy alliance against enemies, that easy commerce. Perhaps to be European was to have a visceral sense of a crucifix and of the Man of Sorrows, an avowed disgust of Jews, a patronising attitude to women, a fear of monstrous pagans, a pride in royal lineages. Perhaps it was the shared symbols, rather than their intrinsic meaning, that allowed so vast an interaction on a European scale of people who would swear that they were above all Bavarians, Auvergnats, Friulans, or Welsh.

NOTES

* I wish to thank Janet Nelson and Paul Strohm for their helpful and corrective comments on a draft of this paper.

1 See on this type of genre in the Middle Ages P. Spufford, 'Spaitmittelalterliche Kaufmannsnotizbucher als Quellen zur Bankengeschichte', in Kredit im Spatmittelalterlichen undfrahneuzeitlichen Europa, M. North (ed), Cologne, 1991, pp. 103-20.

2 On Margery and her book see C. W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: the Book and the World of Margery Kempe, Ithaca NY, 1983.

3 The Book of Margery Kempe, B. A. Windeatt trans., Harmondsworth, 1985, book 2, chapters 2, 3, 5, pp. 267-79.

4 On Wilsnack see J. Sumption, Pilgrimage, 1975, pp. 282-4. 5 The Book of Margery Kempe, Book 2, chapter 6, pp. 279-81. 6 The Book of Margery Kempe, Book 1, chapters 52-53, pp. 161-9; see also chapter 54,

pp. 169-73. 7 On which see A. Hudson, The Premature Reformation, Oxford, 1988. 8 For a detailed chronology see H. Kaminsky, A History of the Hussite Revolution,

Berkeley CA, 1967.



9 G. Leff, 'Wyclif and Hus: a Doctrinal Comparison', in Wyclif and his Times, A. Kenny (ed), Oxford, 1986, pp. 105-25, at pp. 117-8.

10 Leff, 'Wyclif and Hus', pp. 118-25; M. Keen, 'The Influence of Wyclif', in Wyclif and his Times, A. Kenny (ed), Oxford, 1986, pp. 127-45, at pp. 137-45.

11 A. Kenny, "'The Accursed Enemy": the Counter-Reformation Reputation of John Wyclif', in Wyclif and his Times, A. Kenny (ed), Oxford, 1986, pp. 147-68; at pp. 150-3.

12 On his European reputation see V. Murdoch, 'The Fifteenth-Century Reaction and the Sixteenth-Century Reformation', in The Wyclif Tradition, Athens Georgia, 1979, pp. 1-5.

13 The Non-cycle Mystery Plays, 0. Waterhouse (ed), EETS Extra Ser. 104, 1909, pp. 54-87.

14 S. Beckwith, 'Ritual, Church and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body', in Culture and History, 1350-1660, D. Aers (ed), 1992, pp. 65-89.

15 L. Muir, 'The Mass on the Medieval Stage', Comparative Drama 23, 1989/90, pp. 314-30, at pp. 317-18.

16 M. Rubin, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 102-3.

17 See for example the Wycliffite text in Selections from English Wycliffite writings, A. Hudson (ed), Cambridge, 1978, no. 19, pp. 97-104, 187-9.

18 R. Tuck, 'Humanists and scholastics on war and peace', in 'Sorry Comforters': Political Thought and International Relations from Grotius to Kant, Oxford, 1993, ch. 1.

19 H. G. Koenigsberger, 'Dominium regale or Dominium politicum et regale: monarchs and parliaments in early modern Europe', in Politicians and virtuosi: essays in early modern history, 1986, pp. 1-25; esp. pp. 1-2.

20 C. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, Chicago, 1985, especially chapters 3, 6, 8, 10, 11; J. P. J. Goldberg, 'Female labour, service and marriage in northern towns during the Middle Ages', Northern history 22 (1986), pp. 18-38; J. P. J. Goldberg, 'Marriage, migration, servanthood and life-cycle in Yorkshire towns of the later Middle Ages: some York cause paper evidence', Continuity and change 1 (1986), pp. 141-69.

21 P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York, 1988, p. 318; E. A. Clark, "'Adam's Only Companion": Augustine and the Early Christian Debate on Marriage', in The Old Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex and Marriage in the Medieval World, R. R. Edwards and S. Spector (eds), Albany NY, 1991, pp. 15-31.

22 See J. V. Fleming, Reason and the lover, Princeton NJ, 1984. 23 See forthcoming article by J. Wogan-Browne, in Framing medieval bodies, S. Kay and

M. Rubin (eds), Manchester, 1993. 24 La Querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents, J. L. Baird and J. R. Kane (eds), North

Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 199, Chapel Hill NC, 1978; P.-Y. Badel, Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe siecle. Etude de la reception de l'oeuvre, Geneva, 1980.

25 See The Romaunt of the Rose and Roman de la Rose: a Parallel Text Edition, R. Sutherland (ed), Oxford, 1967.

26 On this see D. Wallace, 'Chaucer and the European Rose', Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1984), pp. 61-7.

27 R. F. Green, 'Chaucer's Victimised Women', Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988), pp. 3-21, esp. pp. 7ff; R. Howard Bloch, 'Medieval Misogyny', Representations 20 (1987), pp. 1-24.

28 Hoccleve's works. II: the minor poems, I. Gollancz (ed), EETS Extra Ser. 73, London, 1925; L'Epitre on pp. 20-34.

29 Ibid., lines 8-14, p. 20.


Article Contentsp. [162]p. 163p. 164p. 165p. 166p. 167p. 168p. 169p. 170p. 171p. 172p. 173p. 174p. 175

Issue Table of ContentsHistory Workshop, No. 33 (Spring, 1992), pp. i-viii+1-308Front Matter [pp. i-viii]Editorial [pp. iv-vii]A Word at War: The Italian Army and Brigandage 1860-1870 [pp. 1-24]Ireland's Field Day [pp. 25-37]'The Last of the Gentlemen's Wars': Women in the Boer War Concentration Camp Controversy [pp. 38-56]Copenhagen Children's Lives and the Impact of Institutions, c. 1840-1920 [pp. 57-72]History in OperationRadical Plurality: History Workshops as a Practical Critique of Knowledge [pp. 73-99]Lucie Varga: A Central European Refugee in the Circle of the French "Annales", 1934-1941 [pp. 100-120]Women and the World of the "Annales" [pp. 121-137]The Poisoned Society: The Stasi File Syndrome in the Former GDR [pp. 138-144]

Special Feature: Europe's Medieval Origins?On the Making of Europe: Reflections from Delhi [pp. 145-151]Cultural Conformity and Social Conservatism in Early Medieval Europe [pp. 152-161]The Culture of Europe in the Later Middle Ages [pp. 162-175]Medieval Ideas of Europe and Their Modern Historians [pp. 176-180]The Creation of Europe [pp. 181-196]

Work in ProgressMary Wollstonecraft and the Wild Wish of Early Feminism [pp. 197-219]Reading the Signs: II. Fact-Grubbers and Mind-Readers [pp. 220-251]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 252-254]Review: untitled [pp. 254-258]Review: untitled [pp. 258-259]Review: untitled [pp. 259-260]Review: untitled [pp. 261-263]Review: untitled [pp. 263-264]Review: untitled [pp. 264-266]Review: untitled [pp. 266-268]Review: untitled [pp. 268-270]Review: untitled [pp. 270-271]Review: untitled [pp. 271-274]Review: untitled [pp. 274-275]Review: untitled [pp. 275-276]Review: untitled [pp. 277-281]Review: untitled [pp. 281-283]Review: untitled [pp. 283-284]

Report BackInaugural Meeting of History Workshop: London Labour Parties History Group, 9th February, 1992, Conway Hall, London [pp. 285-287]Archives, Icons and Artefacts: Labour History Resources. Conference of the Society for the Study of Labour History. TUC, London, November 30 1991 [pp. 287-289]Sorbonne Conference Report [pp. 290-291]Mass Media/Mass-Observation News Item from Dorothy Sheridan 7 October 1991 [pp. 291-293]

LettersHistory Workshop Journal [pp. 294-295]History Workshop 25th Anniversary Conference [pp. 295-296]History from Below [pp. 296-297]

ObituaryMasha Enzensberger 1943-1992 [pp. 298-302]

Noticeboard [pp. 303-306]Back Matter [pp. 307-308]