Fallible Authors. Alastair Minnis

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      INTRODUCTION

      Authority and Fallibility in Medieval Textual Culture

      “We elected a president, not a pope,” Barbra Streisand is reported to have said of Bill Clinton, when the allegations about his sexual escapades were flying thick and fast.¹ Betty Friedan agreed: “It is of no consequence to me what Clinton does in his private life. . . . All that is important is his public policies.”² Other voices condemned him for falling beneath “the standard of behavior we expect from Presidents,”³ for having brought the high office of the President of the United States into disrepute. “Though elected by people and filled by men,” this “office has a sacred quality,” wrote Hugo Young.⁴ “The most powerful democracy in the world invests its leader with a special eminence as head of state as well as head of government.” And yet— though Clinton “set a bad example” and “certainly [is] not a man of character,” his “lies weren’t about public business.” Young continues: “He wasn’t caught knowing from the start that the Sudan factory he bombed had nothing to do with lethal weaponry. In a quotidian matter, he lied.” Moving from 1998 to 2005, and to another president, the situation seems to have been reversed. A major cause of then-current anxiety was whether George W. Bush, marketed to the American people as a “man of character” (with the probity of his personal life apparently unassailable), knew from the start that Saddam Hussein had little if anything to do with the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks—and hence lied about “public business.”

      Such distinctions between the awe-inspiring office and the fallible office-holder, between a person’s authoritative public position and his or her private peccadilloes—indeed between transgressions perpetrated within “public business” which affect whole nations as opposed to those committed within the “quotidian” space occupied by a few individuals whose feelings have no wider consequence—would have been familiar to the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer. But of course we must be attentive to the considerable cultural differences which determined their specific meanings in time and history. I have attempted to pay such attention in focusing on the apparent division—sometimes it looks like a wide gulf—between the two facets which, following medieval culture’s dualistic categorization, came to constitute an “authority.” On the one hand, the authority was a figure worthy of respect, belief, and obedience; on the other, the authority was a mere mortal who was capable of much stupidity and sin. This crucial binary was constructed through late-medieval discourses of office versus man (and, in special circumstances, woman), of public versus private, and of the ways in which these twains met. Or failed to meet.

      My interest, then, is in the array of “official” requirements and restrictions which the embodiment of authority entailed, and the ways in which mere fallible mortals were presented as failing to live up to those de-mands—whether because they committed high (or low) crimes and misdemeanors, or failed (whether openly or secretly) to practice what they preached. The problem is perennial: how can authority be invested in a corporeal being that is so resistant to rule, to the bridling of its desires? In Chaucer’s day the matter was further complicated by the ubiquitous belief in the inferiority of women. Half of the human race was deemed fallible because its members lived in the wrong kind of material body, the inferior female rather than the superior male form. Despite the constant medieval elevation of spirit over flesh, biological sex was a crucial factor in determining whether a person could hold public office or exercise authority over others.

      Such fallibilities could be seen as deficiency, whether due to some lack on an individual’s part or to a general condition which affected an entire sex, as in Aristotle’s claim (frequently reaffirmed during the later Middle Ages) that a woman was a “deformed male.”⁵ Or they could be taken as an affront to culturally sanctioned codes of behavior—perhaps judged a failing with specifically religious implications, identified as sin which demanded punishment in this life and/or in the next. Or, indeed, condemned as deviancy. That last term needs careful definition, given the use of “deviancy” in contemporary parlance to designate specifically sexual behavior. Such a use pervades recent literary criticism of Chaucer’s Pardoner in particular, his (allegedly) homosexual preferences being presented as a challenge to the heteronormative principles endemic in late-medieval culture. The matter of whether the Pardoner’s body and behavior are “deviant” in this way— or in some other (can he be seen as some sort of “eunuch,” for instance?)— is certainly important, and so I have treated it at some length. But it does not fill all the available ethical space; there are other kinds of sin in question, and on public display. The broader moral purchase of the term “deviancy” will therefore be reclaimed below, in light of the standard meaning of the medieval Latin verb devio: “to turn from the straight road, to go aside, to deviate.”⁶

      That is the sense present in Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, Book III, met. viii, when Dame Philosophy laments how ignorance leads wretched men astray on a devious path:

      Eheu quae miseros tramite devios

      Abducit ignorancia! (1–2)⁷

      More specifically, a person who fell into heresy was deemed to have deviated from true Christian doctrine, as may be illustrated by a passage from the first of Simon of Cremona’s Disputationes de indulgentiis (c. 1380), a work to be discussed in Chapter 1 below. Anyone who advocates an “indiscreet indulgence” is a heretic, Simon declares, for heresy involves two things, an error in reasoning and a stubbornness of will, blatant deviation from the truth (a veritate deviare). Moving on to examples in Middle English, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love (c. 1385) describes the period from the beginning of the world to the advent of Christ as the time of “deviacion, that is to say, goyng out of trewe way.”⁸ And in the A-fragment of the Romaunt of the Rose the lover tells Dame Resoun that he is “so devyaunt” from her “scole” that he has not been helped at all by her doctrine (4787–91).

      Chaucer translates the abovementioned passage from De consolatione philosophiae as follows, in his Boece: “Allas! Whiche folie and whiche ignorance mysledeth wandrynge wrecchis fro the path of verray good!”⁹ This idea of “wandrynge” reappears in Chaucer’s initial description of the Wife of Bath, who has been to Jerusalem three times—“She hadde passed many a straunge strem”—and also visited Rome, Boulogne, Compostella, and Cologne. The narrator concludes that “She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye” (I(A) 464–67); presumably Chaucer was influenced here by the common understanding of deuius as “extra viam ire.” Apparently Alisoun’s enthusiasm for pilgrimage has not kept her on the straight and narrow path of Christian morality. The same could be said of her sparring partner the Pardoner, also a keen pilgrim. We may recall that he embarked on the Canterbury pilgrimage shortly after returning from Rome, and has the veronica badge—along with a “walet . . . / Bretful of pardoun”—to prove it (I(A) 685–67).¹⁰ And little good has it done him: he is, quite shockingly and scandalously, not a “man of character.” In the Wife of Bath’s case, her moral lapses are exacerbated by the fact that she was born into an inferior, female body—of which she seems belligerently proud, while struggling to cope with the fact that it is now past its physical prime.

      These complexly “deviant” and mobile characters, the most blatantly fallible СКАЧАТЬ