Public Dreams and Private Myths: Perspective in Middle English Literature Author(s): Russell A.

Peck Reviewed work(s): Source: PMLA, Vol. 90, No. 3 (May, 1975), pp. 461-468 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/461632 . Accessed: 18/11/2011 01:31
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RUSSELL A. PECIK

Public Dreams and Private Myths: Perspective in Middle English Literature

All things resolve themselves into the ONE. -Thierry of Chartres, De Sex Dierum Operibus Let me tell you a story as Guerin tells about a peasant and his well-bred wife. She was beautiful and courteous and he loved her tenaciously. But she loved a priest. One day the priest decided to speak with her. When he arrived he found the door locked, but through a small hole saw that the husband and wife had sat down to eat. The priest was upset that the husband had so little sense not to enjoy the woman. So he called out, "What are you doing, good people?" The peasant replied, "By my faith, sir, we are eating. Come in and we will give you some." "Eating?" said the priest, "You're crazy. You are screwing!" "Hush, sir, we speak truly. We are eating as you can see." "I have no doubt of it," said the priest, "You screw, for I see well. You're trying to befuddle me. If you stood here and I were in there you would indeed see that I told you the truth." So the peasant came quickly and unlocked the door. In went the priest, fastened the bolt, and in an instant grabbed the lady and did what women love more than anything. The peasant looked in and saw the arse of his wife uncovered and the priest on top and asked, "As God may save you, is this a joke?" The priest answered, "What do you think? Don't you see? I eat at this table." "By the heart of God," the peasant replied, "This is like a fabliau. If I had not heard otherwise, I would have believed you were screwing my wife." "Hush, sir, I am not," said the priest; "by my soul, so it seemed to me just a moment ago." "I well believe you," said the peasant. Thus he was tricked by the priest and his own stupidity. He felt no pain, and since the door had a hole in it, it is said to this day, "One hole pleases many fools."'

the fecundity and freshness with which medieval ingenuity can arrive at new perspectives for invigorating old ideas. Though that society suffered as many constrictive hardships and failures as our own, it managed to maintain, for a time at least, a resilience of mind and carefreeness which has fascinated our later times almost to the point of envy. That a writer like Guerin might wittily turn
the ineffable One, which theoretically holds the

only true happiness the Many may know, into that unspeakable one, which pleases all alike, bespeaks a witty confidence in cultural models which is
virtually beyond our ken.

EITHERPLATO NOR Pythagoras could

have imagined that his metaphysics of the One and the Many might end up in an

Old French fabliau. But the Middle Ages could. The medieval approach to experience reveals a
breadth and playfulness of perspective unsurpassed by any other epoch of Western society. What strikes one living in the twentieth century is

One source of resilience within the late medieval approach to experience is the preoccupation with perspective itself. In the graphic arts Giotto and Cimbue experiment with visual frames, their pictures becoming extensions of the room that holds the viewer, while Boccaccio, Gower, and Chaucer explore literary frames and new uses of personae which enable them to juxtapose multiple points of view simultaneously. In music the elaborate motets of the School of Notre Dame counterpoint not only several musical lines polyphonically, but several texts as well, to stunning effect. The fetish over perspective is not simply a phenomenon of the arts, however; it perpetrates new and subtle distinctions and propositions in all areas of medieval learning, whether in the theological arguments evolving from the distinction between God's absolute and potential powers, the optical studies of Grosseteste and Bacon, the mathematics of Pecham, the theories of relative motion of Oresme and Buridan, the suppositional logic of Burleigh and Ockham, the epistemological study of Holcot and Mirecourt, or the biblical criticism of Wyclif. Indeed, no period of European history has been more preoccupied with perspective and mental space than the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But although the almost universal fascination with perspectivemight account in part for the love

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Perspective in Middle English Literature

public consciousness, their expression will tend to touch upon common denominations. In twentiethcentury literature, which lacks a common mythology, symbolism, and imagery, meaning adheres to the work in a more restrictive way. The message tends to be more self-contained. From our childhood we remember MacLeish's axiom: "A poem should not mean, but be."3 A work is its words. This is true to some extent for all literature, but it is less true for medieval literature than any other. Medieval literaturehas meaning; that is its goal, a goal to be explicated by its audience. Its words and contexts are part of the public mythic vocabulary; its plots and its language function quite differently from those of modern literature which is conceived with less accessibility to public myth. The modern poet tends to write in isolation. It is almost as if he had no audience, as if he is compelled to create one out of himself along with a myth of his own to which some private group or unidentified public might relate. The medieval poet, on the other hand, writes to a familiar audience, familiar both literally in terms of the intimate entourage within which his poem is vocally performed, and figurativelyin that the poet and his audience belong to the same mythic family, the family of Adam. The medieval poet reminds his audience that it is an audience and that it participatesin his poem even though it may have forgotten that it did. He sees himself as a man behind his times, who re-creates the past and seeks to rediscover derivations. For him the problem is not whether the past is relevant or not; it is, rather, how to make the present relevant. To do that there is only one way-to make vital the past so that the present may be understood and reborn in a more wholesome context. His work will embody private myth (a dream, if you wish) which will become a means of entering into the public myth afresh. Often the shock the tension or thrill-of a medieval poem will lie in the bursting of this barrier between private dream and public dream. Consider, for example, this short lyric of the thirteenth century: Wel, who shal thise homes blowe Holy Rode thy day? Now is he deed and lieth lowe
Was wont to blowe hem ay.4

of parody and the inversion of models for ludicrous effect in the literary arts, it does not explain the buoyancy of mind that kept the medieval imagination afloat. That perhaps is rather tied up with the old ideas themselves which the literature reinvigorated. Medieval poetry is very different from modern poetry, but its differences are highly instructive to us, especially in a period like our own which has so little confidence in its art forms and which is so engrossed in trying to cultivate an audience. Curiously enough, the two societies share many topics in common. Like the later Middle Ages we have become keenly interested in perspective and spatial relationships, especially relationships of mental space. Like the medieval people, we have become preoccupied with the mind and, even more than they, we are given to abstraction and psychology. We also make much of epistemology, which has virtually replaced traditional philosophical study in some of our universities, much as it did in medieval universities. Both societies share a delight in the absurd and, in their cognizance of the limitations of human language and reason, move toward existentialism or other forms of nominalism in areas of moral inquiry. It was more than idle curiosity that led Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, and Borges into the study of medieval thought. They discovered kindred spirits there. But two enormous differencesloom between the sensibilities of medieval and modern society: (1) Though both societies are highly cerebral, technology had not yet cut medieval society's roots from the earth. This is a topic for another essay. I shall pass over it here, though the opening fabliau offers a glimpse of medieval society's acceptance of its earthiness free of euphemisms, or, for that matter, from the rebel's dysphemisms, which have so straitened the minds of Industry's children. (2) Medieval society enjoyed a common mythology. We do not, and as far as the arts are concerned, this is the more profound difference. We have the Many, but not the One. The range between the various and the same gives medieval poetry its breadth and the remarkableflexibility of perspective which so intrigues the modern reader. Joseph Campbell has suggested, "Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream."2What is so striking about medieval literature is the uniformity of its depersonalized dream. Its personal myths are as private as those of any time. Only as they become public, as they relate to

The poem creates admirably in short space the persona's preoccupation with the moment as he

RussellA. Peck
anxiously frets over the loss of the herald. Who now shall sound the horn? How can the Holy Cross Day pageantry get under way? Then the naivete of the question hits us and the awesome shock of the public dream bursts upon our consciousness. Perspective and time sense shift and the mind leaps beyond the petty concern of the busy moment. The auspicious day and the bugler's death project our awareness to Judgment and its sounding horn which will inaugurate the last procession after the last death. Who indeed will sound the horn, for the procession of the Cross, for the dead bugler, for every man? We start with a small, private concern and are left with a universal question. Who will that bugler be? As poetry, this bursting of the naive consciousness of private concern into the public domain is thrilling and what seems to a modern audience to be one of the unique features of medieval poetry. Because of the uniformity of medieval mythology, its language, especially its symbolism and imagery, functions for its audience differentlyfrom that of modern poetry where a mood must be established to engage us in its private view. In Chaucer's Miller's Tale, for example, we find allusions to Noah's flood, Mary, and Joseph. Yet "hende Nicholas," despite his descent from above to bed his "Virgin," a bedding that costs him sorely while wounded and suspended across the beam calling for water, is no Christ-type. Nor is the cuckolded Carpenter a Joseph-type. The allusions to the Virgin, the carpenter, and the divinely inspired interloper evoke a myth outside the poem which remains quite outside and which, though connected by allusion, stands not so much as moral commentary on the poem's action as definition of boundary for the reader. Such allusions do not demand "organic" integration with character, situation, or whatever it was that evoked the myth. They establish a play area for the audience and encourage the reader to respond as he chooses, moving either along one sideline of private dream or the other of public myth, or reversing his field even at will should his interest lead him to do so. The play area is broad-like the gown of Boethius' Lady Philosophy, reaching from wr 6. It is a curious paradox that such to poetry, so impersonal in its mood-so unprivateshould often end up being more personal in its relation with its audience than much of the ostensibly "personal," self-analytic poetry of more recent times. Unlike MacLeish, a medieval poet

463

would not look on his poem as an end but rather as a means. The problem for modern readers is to find where the poet has invited his audience to
join in his poem.

Chaucer repeatedly reminds us of this personal feature of medieval literature, inviting us as audience to join his poem, play with it, even amend (though not emend) it to truth as we perceive it. He makes no claim for originality; his story is ours as well as his. We as audience are even more important than the poem itself, which is a mere occasion. We should converse with it and exercise our personal judgment in response to it. As Chaucer explains in the Second Nun's Tale: Yet preyeI yow that redenthat I write, Foryeveme that I do no diligence This ilke storiesubtillyto endite, For bothe have I the wordesand sentence Of hym that at the seintesreverence The storie wroot, and folwen hire legende, And pray you that ye wole my werkamende.5 We encounter similar attitudes in Chaucer'sdream visions, Troilus, the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, and even in the Retraction. The reader is invited to become his own plowman in the fair field between private myth and public dream. If he wishes to convert the work into a paradigm of courtliness or a theological homily that is his privilege. There are many reasons behind this attitude toward poetry, most of which have to do with the nature of the public myth itself. The medieval cosmos is very differentfrom our own. Perhaps we can begin to clarify the difference by juxtaposing two short poems which are in some ways similar, but similar through opposites. The first is by William Carlos Williams, one which has been referred to as an imagist poem: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazedwith rain water besidethe white
chickens6

The second poem is in its way also an imagist poem, though by a poet who lived more than 800 years before Williams expounded his theory of imagination:

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dle Perspective in Midc English Literature

Myrie songen the monkes binne Ely Whan Cnut Kyng rewe ther-by; Roweth, knightes, neer the lond And here we thise monkes song. (ca. 1105; Middle English Lyrics, p. 3)

Both poems concern recognition of the image. Everything "depends" on the astuteness of our eye to see things accurately, on seeing what is there at an exact moment and not missing what we see. So far our poets are in strict agreement. But although both poems depict precisely the image before the poet's eye and would call our attention to what they see, the images in the poets' brains are antithetical. William Carlos Williams focuses his attention on the surface, enunciating the redness of the wheelbarrow, the water glaze, and the whiteness of the chickens. He would strip words of cultural accretions in an effort to realize the thing depicted on its own terms. Then, perhaps, through the idea in the thing, the mind might rise "to some approximate co-extension with the universe" ("Spring and All," p. 105). Some qualities of Williams' theory, especially the notion of capturing a moment in order to intuit a universe, seem akin to medieval sensibility. But the difference between the two imagist poems lies in the presence and absence of a public myth in the two relative cultures. Williams' poem struggles to declare a world of things which by the very phenomenon of their existence constitute what Williams would define as his myth. The singular helps him relate to the phenomena of the many, yet though he speaks almost mystically of "co-extension with the universe," his is a universe devoid of meaning. The medieval poet, on the other hand, sees in his image an idea permeated by his culture. He uses his words to evoke that culture rather than to preen its accretions away. His poem delineates the details before the physical eye-the monks merrily singing in Ely Abbey, the king on the river in his boat right there near the land, and the knights with him rowing. But what has caught his inner eye is an image of social order and hierarchy which seems to him to be the essential beauty of the image- the monks doing what monks do, the king behaving regally, and the knights joyously performing their service. His words hearken back to a Neoplatonic cosmology of sympathetic correspondences. He appreciates relativity, to be sure, but relativity of the Many to the One as well as the

one to the many. His world enjoys a uniformity which makes the public dream recognizable even in the single image. One virtue of the Ptolemaic universe over the Copernican or other more recent descriptions is that it offered its people a psychologically valid dwelling place. Earth is not the center of Ptolemy's mathematical construct-man is. The universe confirms his roundness and his oneness. Its order and rhythms teach him rhythm and order. But although creation revolves around his perspective, the effect is not solipsistic. Moral and ethical questions require him to maintain a discrete perspective both close and far, small and large, on what surrounds him. His inner and outer selves are understood through reciprocation between himself, the rest of creation, and the Creator. The interconnectedness of his universe moves him toward the One, though he is not the One. These are well-known features of Christian cosmology where a Creator has formed all according to number and measure and shaped man in His own likeness. But the psychological implications of such a cosmology are manifold and bear review. First of all, in such a cosmology man is not isolated. Since he exists in a reciprocal relationship with the rest of creation on the one hand and the Creator on the other, man is a center, his mind a mediator. He is both observer and actor. Moreover, because of his reciprocal middle position, he is a pilgrim, a viator. "The way," St. Augustine says, "is both God and man-God being the goal and man the way."7Man is his own means. As St. Anselm explains in the Monologion: The more earnestlythe rationalmind devotesitself to learningits own nature, the more effectivelydoes it rise to the knowledgeof that Being; and the more carelesslyit contemplatesitself, the farther does it of descendfrom the contemplation that Being.8 Anselm's beautiful thought implies a third psychological implication of Ptolemy's scheme, namely, that the patterns of creation, especially those patterns within man himself, reflect the mind of the Creator. Such forms are man's means of participating in divinity. The universe, that is, all created
things that turn toward the One (unus-+uversus), is

like a book, to be read and studied, a directive to perspective which holds lessons in form. As St. Bonaventure explains: The whole world is a shadow, a way, and a trace; a

RussellA. Peck
book with writingfront and back. Indeed, in every creaturethere is a refulgenceof the divine exemplar, but mixedwith darkness; henceit resembles some kind of opacitycombinedwith light. Also it is a way leading to the exemplar.As you notice a ray of light coming in througha windowis coloredaccording the shades to of the differentpanes, so the divine ray shines differently in each creatureand in the various properties.
... It is a trace of God's wisdom.9

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Finally, because of his concentric sense of space, man's sense of time is likewise concentric. "Time is to eternity," says Boethius' Philosophy, "as the circle is to the center."10' Such a view of time and space is highly metaphorical. The world is a riddle, the most elaborately extended metaphor since the Word was conceived of the Father. The fact that it is so profound an enigma is one of man's greatestjoys and hopes. There is something greater than himself, so great that he cannot ever fully comprehend it. Yet in its temporal manifestation it provides him with perpetually fresh perspectives. Empirical reflection on the orderly rhythms of the larger order with its concomitant mythology makes possible the therapeutic coordination of private dreams which keeps the mind healthy. In explaining the pilgrimage quality of man's earthly life inside the riddle, St. Augustine observed: "Let no one think he has discovered nothing if he has been able to discover how incomprehensible is the object of his search.'"11 is It those who settle for something less than the ineffable who end up rigid and frustrated. Man's consolation lies in playing with the enigma, constructing forms through imitation which enable him to move about more certainly if only on their self-defined terms. St. Anselm puts it this way: Oftenwe speakof thingswhichwe do not expresswith precisionas they are; but by another expressionwe indicate what we are unwillingor unable to express with precision,as whenwe speakin riddles.And often we see a thing, not preciselyas it is in itself, but througha likenessor image, as when we look upon a face in a mirror.And in this way, we often expressand yet do not express,see and yet do not see, one and the same object; we expressand see it throughanother. (Monologion, Ch. lxv, pp. 129-30) This notion of the unsolvable riddle is crucial to understanding medieval literature as well as cosmology. Art is man's chief means of playing with the larger riddle; thus the prominence of esthetics

in medieval cosmology. Nature expresses the mystery of Eternal Art through its forms; man, like Daedalus, can answer riddles with riddles. Though we may not understand all inferences of the Creator's riddles, what we do perceive, St. Anselm insists, "is not therefore necessarily false." No one explication of such enigmas, whether by means of scientific logic or the constructing of answering riddles, can supplant the enigma. The explicator, be he scientist, mathematician, or poet, must play with the many possibilities in constructs which reflect like mirrors and similitudes the idea, knowing that what he constructs is Imago, not Verbum. His truth is limited by time and placement of perspective. An excellent example of the medieval fascination with the world as riddle may be found in the short poem "Erthetook of Erthe,"a poem that was very popular in its own day, if number of manuscript recurrencesis any indication.
Erthe took of erthe, erthe wyth wogh; Erthe other erthe to the erthe drough; Erthe leyde erthe in erthen through: Than hadde erthe of erthe erthe ynough. (ca. 1320; Middle English Lyrics, p. 37)

Earth. What is it? A jingle we travel with to reflect upon. Let me suggest four reflections (perspectives) to indicate something of the range of response we might expect from a medieval "reader": Perspective I
I am earth. I have known love-sickness (woe) of a beautiful woman. I drew her down to the earth in my desire, And I put my earth in her earthen trough. That was very satisfying.

Perspective II
Adam is earth. He loved Eve with pains of love. To quench his desire he drew her to earth. For that he got death and an earthen trough. I dare say that cooled his lust.

Perspective iII
Mankind is earth. He took from Adam the woes of the world. Though he labored and suffered, he was worn down with despair Until death and the grave took him. That, at least, was some relief.

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in Noah the ark-builderwith his fearful yet sharptongued wife, and, it is hoped, we see our share in the Second Adam too. These figuresare more than mere roles in a play. They reflect the plots of the real life drama into which men's lives have been cast. They typify those human plots that occur and recur daily throughout men's lives, roles through which we ourselves as fourteenth-century people must define and understand.Their plot is our plot. As far as we are concerned, their time is centered in us. We, as medieval people, share the same public dream. This circular time sense enables the medieval mind to project from the moment into both personal past and historical past with common familiarity. It is what makes the medieval perspective so spacious and yet at the same time so intimate. It reveals the aspiration to construct gothic arches of grand proportion and to surround them with miniature adornments-the large and small in one place. From our modern perspective such art reveals a mind that knows where it is. It is also a mind that understands words and knows how to use metaphor. One of the dilemmas of the modern poet is that his society scorns words. It has done its best to cut itself off from the past. The past is words, and words are the passport to the lost self. We saw an example of this process in our reflection upon "Erthe took of Erthe," where we used the poem as a means of recovering the divine center. The riddle provoked not only experience but also memory and gave us back the public dream. For the medieval viator, poetry is a road home, an entrance back into the myth and the fullness of time. The Creator of this myth is the Word, the One behind the many, the Word of words. Poetry is his means of discovery-Will in search of his Piers the Plowman, the Wakefield shepherds in search of their gloria, Geoffrey contesting for the free dinner. The search progresses because the perceptions change. As they change, new words reveal old truths: Lully, lullay, lully, lullay, The faucon hath born my make awey. He bar him up, he bar him down, He bar him into an orchardbroun. In that orchardther was an halle That was hangedwyth purpreand palle. And in that halle ther was a bed, It was hangedwyth gold so red.

Perspective iv Christ became earth. He took upon Himself the woes of mankind. Mary drew this second Adam ("othererthe")from heavenin IncarnateForm. Men crucifiedHim and laid Him in the tomb. Then Death'smortalclaim on man was paid. None of these glosses may claim exclusiveness or rank over the others. In my reading I simply moved from a center (ego) outward through expanding spheres of consciousness. Each gloss is as valid as the others, and there will be as many variants as there are meanings and perspectives on earth. Only the plot stays the same. One does not ask of a poem like this, "What does it mean?" Rather one asks "What can it mean?" It embodies one of the great archetypes of human history; its riddle contains all history. Its explication demands of us a peculiarly medieval perspective on time and place. A cosmology of concentric circles yields a chronology of concentric times. Combined with a Christian sense of linear time progressing from creation to apocalypse, it evokes a triple time sense. Man lives in the moment. He also lives within the span of history, a history that defines itself by repeating its own plots. And, ultimately, man lives in eternity. His problem is to coordinate these three time senses in his psyche synchronically. One commonly encounters this triple time sense in medieval art where one portion of a painting will depict the realm of eternity, others various moments in history both past and present, as if all exist simultaneously as part of a single whole. Perhaps the most vivid examples might be taken from medieval drama, however, where, in the mystery plays, we see our contemporaries in the guise of mankind from the beginning of time to its end. We live in the Sixth Age, the Age of the New Dispensation which reinterpretsthrough reenactment all the blind events of former ages. As we participate in the play we shift back and forth through time with startling rapidity (not anachronism!), from fourteenth-centuryreferences to biblical references which are not, and need not be, arranged by linear chronology. We see that our life shares this moment with that of the Old Adam who lives in us now, as he lived in other men before us, by virtue of his humanity. We see that we also share in the crude and selfish, yet laughable, Cain,

RussellA. Peck
And in that bed ther lieth a knight, His woundesbledyngday and nyght. By that beddesside ther kneletha may, And she wepethbothe nyght and day. And by that beddesside therstondetha ston,
Corpus Cristi writen ther-on. (ca. 1500; Middle English Lyrics, p. 171)

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With each couplet we move closer to the centerfrom lullaby and romance to a strangely brown orchard, to a splendid hall (yet terrible-a hall of death), to the bedside of an ever-dying knight, his lady, and their mysterious, vital reciprocity like night and day of flowing tears and flowing blood, and finally to the discovery of the Word-Corpus Cristi. Each couplet redefinesthe journey until the ultimate revelation which though now reduced from words to Word, remains as mysterious as before. We discover the incomprehensible object. Poetry also restores words to form. It makes definition possible, definition that, though no ultimate end, holds true for its own words at least as they state, then redefine,themselves in each other's presence: Now goth sonne underwode,Me reweth,Marie,thy faire rode. Now goth sonne undertree,Me reweth,Marie,thy sone and thee.
(ca. 1240; Middle English Lyrics, p. 5)

instead settle modestly with "Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn": Adam scriveyn,if ever it thee bifalle Boece or Troylusfor to wrytennewe, Underthy long lokkesthou most havethe scalle, But after my makyngthou wrytemore trewe; So ofte a-dayeI mot thy werkrenewe, It to correcteand eek to rubbeand scrape; and rape. And al is thorughthy negligence
(Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 534)

Woods change to trees, the fair countenance (rode) to the Cross (rode); the sun becomes Christ, and our initial attraction to the woman's fair face turns to compassion. As we watch, we see in. The usual becomes unique, and with the new perception the public myth is reclaimed. Examples with which to conclude a discussion of medieval poetics, examples that combine cosmology and psychology and use words to pierce the public myth, are almost as numerous as the poems themselves. Hugh of St. Victor's complex search for peace of mind through verbal juxtaposition in De Arca Noe Morali would serve well. So too the journey through verbal redefinition in Piers Plowman. But those works are long. Let us

The stanza captures delightfully the poet's impatience with his lazy amanuensis who copies so carelessly the text of his "maker" that Geoffrey has to emend the text by rubbing and scraping to get the words right as they were supposed to have been. Chaucer wittily bestows fit punishment on his clerk: Adam makes Geoffrey rub and scrapelet Adam have dandruffon his lazy head so that he will rub and scrape in return! Then the words and images turn upon themselves and we begin to share in that larger vocabulary of the public dream. We recall that other Adam Scriveyn, who gave the names to all the creatures and wrote the first chapter of the book in which we are all characters, whose careless act of negligence and rape left us all, through that inborn human propensity for error, to labor and scrape out our living correcting mistakes. Because of his old errors it becomes our job to renew the work "ofte a-daye." And that labor is what so much of medieval literature is about. Much of its greatness depends upon matters quite outside it-the greatness of the myth itself which it attempts to penetrate, a myth sufficiently founded in human experience that we, even in a distant age, have little difficulty in relating to it our lesser myths of Freud, Jung, Sartre, or myths of some contemporary religious sect or national ethos. It deals with the mind's journey toward sense, a sense large enough to cope with our curious bodies and aspiring souls, large enough to hold both our public and private dreams within a single purview.
University of Rochester

Rochester, New York

Notes
1 Paraphrasedfrom Guerin's "Du Prestre ki Abevete,"
in The Literary Context of Chalcer's Fabliaux, ed. Larry
2

The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Bollingen

Benson and Theodore Andersson (Indianapolis: BcbbsMerrill, 1971),pp. 268-73.

Foundation, 1949), p. 19. 3"Ars Poetica," CollectedPoems, 1917-1952 (Boston: Houghton, 1952),p. 41,11. 23-24.

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9 Hexaemeron: Collations on the Six Days, Collation 12, Par. 14, in The Works of Bonaventure, trans. Jose De

4 Robert D. Stevick, ed., One Hundred Middle English

Ixvi, pp. 131-32.

1964),p. 35. Hereafter Lyrics(Indianapolis:Bobbs-Merrill,

cited in text as Middle Englishl Lyrics. 6 Thle Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson

(Cambridge,Mass.: RiversidePress, 1957), p. 208.

6

Vinck (Paterson,N. J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1970),v, 179.

10

"Spring and All," Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott

Consolationl of Philosophy, trans. Richard H. Green

(New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 138. 7City of God, trans. David Weisen, Loeb Classical Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, Library,No. 413 (Cambridge, 1968), Bk. xi, Ch. ii, p. 431.
8

(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), Bk. iv, Prose 6, p. 92.

11 From

J. Moignt's ed. of De Trinitate, Bibliotheque

Monologioln, in St. Anselm: Basic Writings, trans. S.N.

Deane (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing,1962), Ch.

Vol. xvi, as cited by FrederickGoldin, MirAugustinienne, ror of Narcissus(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 249-50.