Response at Sewanee 2026, “Refuge and Fugitivity: Visions of Order at their Limits”

by Posted on

For Session 28.

The Papers:

Alex Climaldi, The Graduate Center, CUNY, “Turbulent Voice: Protest, Fugitivity, and Noise in Gower’s Vox Clamantis”
Andrew Stone, The Graduate Center, CUNY,  “Engineering Intimacy: Technologies of Refuge in the Medieval Hunt”
Chris Buonanno, The Graduate Center, CUNY, “Numinous Sounds: The Production of Desire in the Liber iuratus Honorii”

My response:

Thanks for your talks everyone! I’m in the unusual position here of responding to three graduate students in my own program. I feel that I know each of them well! Because they can hear from me any time, my goal today will just be to affix some burrs to their papers and then get out of the way, expeditiously.

With Alexa’s paper, I’m most interested at present in Gower’s relationship to what we can temporarily call “the people.” You quoted from Book VI, “Hoc ego quod plebis vox clamat clamo” (15), or, in the words Robert J. Meindl and Mark Rile from the Gower Translation Project, “I cry out what the people’s voice cries out.” We find Gower making a similar claim in Book III, “A me non ipso loquor hec, set que michi plebus / vox dedit, et sortem plangis ubique malam”” (11-12), “What I say isn’t just mine, but what the folk’s voice / gives me, which everywhere bemoans our lot.”

I’m most interested in that word “pleb.” Again: “ego quod plebis vox clamat clamo” and “A me non ipso loquor hec, set que michi plebus vox dedit.” We can translate plebs so many ways. Stockton’s classic 1962 translation does both these pairings of vox and plebs as the “voice of the people” (113, 220), suggesting an almost democratic populist voice, suitable, I would think, for the optimism of America some 65 years ago, but also suggesting a slide between the Latin populus and plebs that might be unwarranted.

I wonder. My Latin’s not that hot, so I’m appealing to the audience, and, to Alexa, I’m proposing some further lines of research. We can also do plebs as “the common people,” at least in those instances where it’s meant to contrast with people of a different status, a division that, if anything, may have been sharper in Gower’s London than classical Rome, where senators too were, technically, plebian. It can mean as well not a subset but the “whole people,” which I think is what’s implied by Stockton’s doing it simply as “the people,” as here “people” just means everyone, so that Gower’s authority comes precisely from his being the mouthpiece or spokesperson for the collective. This sense of the word is what I get too from lightly consulting John Balbi’s thirteenth-century Catholicon, a widespread monolingual Latin dictionary.[1] We might even do plebs as “the multitude.”

A fifteenth-century manuscript at Trinity College, largely monolingual, but with scattered English glosses, suggests another, baser meaning, for its short entry on plebs concludes with “collectionum ignobilium an rascayl of folke.”[2] Lest you think that “rascal” is one of those words that once held a positive connotation and had slipped from its status as we wended our way into modernity: it did not.[3] Rascal comes from the French rascaille, rabble or mob.

Surely the Gower of the openings of Book III and VI does not intend for us to hear him speaking on behalf of the rabble! Quite the contrary. But “rabble” seems to be what the word is doing often in Book One, Alexa’s focus, the Visio Anglie. Meindl and Rile do the word variously: as people, folk, or sometimes just as plebs. I don’t fault them for choosing variously: context matters, and the word is indeed at least connotatively slippery. Nonetheless, some examples plucked from a great many: “Diversas plebis sortes vulgaris iniquas” (171; many malicious sorts of the common people”); “plebs viciorum” (1012; vice-ridden plebs); “o furor insane, gens rustica, plebs violenta” (1134; O the insane fury, rustic folk, violent plebs). Stockton does the first of these plebs as “mob” and the last two as “people.” How A. G. Rigg does it in his 2011 translation for the Pontifical Institute, I don’t know, because I didn’t have it at hand: it should be checked though.

Without proposing an argument, I want to suggest the usefulness of worrying over Gower’s relation to the people: is he speaking against them or for them? How does his speaking on their behalf differ from the speech of that talking bird, Wat Tyler, who aims to stir them up rather than, as Gower likes to imagine himself doing, channeling their collective voice through the conduit of just one voice. Does this language of speaking “on behalf of” suggest that of more ritualized political complaint, of an address to the king or parliament? And how does the vox plebis differ from the vox clamantis in deserto, a voice whose claim to authority is its being the lonely one who knows the truth, desperately shouting for an audience? Where does Gower stand in relation to the plebs, and from where does he think he draws his truth?[4]

And now Andrew’s paper, on the kennel and its canine and puerile inhabitants. He has spoken to us of a “coordinated system of psychosomatic technologies,” which operationalizes various elements of the hunting preserve to produce, as it were, a nonhuman subject, which is the preserve itself.

I am reminded of passage I’ve written about before from Richard fitz Nigel’s Dialogue of the Exchequer, which, in the twelfth century, spoke of the king going into the forest to enter his “penetralia” (secret places), where he can enjoy his “maxime delicie” (greatest pleasure). There in the forest, we’re told, the king can at last slough off “the anxious turmoil native to court, to take a little breath in the free air of nature” “naturalis libertatis gratiam paulisper respirant.”[5] We can, as I have done, fault this text for its falsifying portrayal of the forest, which less an escape from court than a fantasy of royal freedom, where what is being escaped is not so much cares as responsibilities and the negotiations of actual governing. In the forest, at least, the king can imagine himself completely in charge.

I’m struck by the penetralia, sanctuary or hidden place or innermost place. I’m struck because this image of the king retreating into himself by going outdoors is so evocative, and because Andrew’s paper is about the one physically interior space in the Master of Game meant exclusively for the hunt. Hunters are indoors elsewhere in this text: sleeping before things kick off, feasting and telling stories afterwards. They start and finish in multipurpose buildings. While we can take the forest itself as a constructed space – walled as it often was, and therefore a kind of paradise, literally a “walled off space” – the kennel is the one place with walls and a roof and chimney and its own differentiation between its courtyard, where the dogs can play, and its own inside, where the dogs can get dry and take shelter. In a way, this is the forest’s most secret place.

Again, taking the privilege of not having to make an argument of my own, I’m reminded of a contrasting secret place from the Middle English King Edward and the Hermit, an acephalous story of a king lost in his own forest, sheltered in a hermit’s hut, and fed by the hermit from meat the hermit had poached from the king’s forest, as the hermit turns out be at least as brawny and able a hunter as the king. Using a false name (“Jack Fletcher”), Edward invites the hermit to dine with him later, and that, most unfortunately, is the bit of the manuscript we’re missing.[6] Myra Seaman’s book on Ashmole 61, which preserves our single copy of this poem, nicely observes that the story subverts the common tale the encounter of king and commoner by substituting a hermit for a peasant or shepherd, so that, in meeting a hermit, the king may be encountering someone who at least may have once been a noble.[7] Here is a penetralia where the king encounters a mirror image, a great hunter, a great drinker, a great raconteur, as hearty an ego-ideal as he could ever desire.

The kennel is another kind of space than this, occupied by trainable children. I’m struck by what Edward’s Master of Game adds to Gaston Phebus’s Livre de Chasse. It’s not so much the age of the boys: Gaston wants boys as young as 7, Edward 7 or 8, and both poopoo those who think only a boy of 12 could do this work. But the last bit of Edward’s entry is his own. We have already heard it: the boy should master his cynegetic terminology and “be no bostere ne janglere.” It is the youth that strikes me here, and the attention to manners.

On the one hand, the manual wants to train someone so well that they become almost invisible. They learn their job so diligently that when the hunter arrives at the kennel to get the dogs, the dogs are simply ready to go, dry and in good health and well fed. The boy, eventually become a man, knows his vocabulary so well that he can act his part without prodding, and being no boaster, he assumes a kind of automatic, even technologized presence in the hunt. For technology, as we know, calls attention to itself only when it fails.[8] I compare him to the favored hunters, in a chapter that’s original with Edward, who finish their day by each “gladly tell[ing] what iche of them hath done of all þe day, and whiche houndes haue best ronne, and boldlyast.”[9] Surely this is a kind of boasting!

And on the other hand, the boy’s extreme youth and the attention to good manners reminds me of medieval conduct literature, so much of which is intended to transform gentry youth from little beasts into boys suitable to stand at table. As J. Allan Mitchell observes, for this genre, “humanizing is a central issue,” which requires bodies to “proportion themselves to things”[10]: spoons, knives, sleeves, served food, or, for the boy in the kennel, dogs, straw, gutters, chimneys, and feces, but also specialized terminology too, which is a kind of immaterial thing with very material consequences in the field of social relations.

Not unimportantly: for Stans Puer at Mensam, proper eating and proper speaking are of paramount interest. You should not be “rekles” (53) when you speak; you should keep your feed and fingers and hands still (55); you should wash your hands (72), and keep “thi spone clen from all maner of fylthe” (92) and you should “jangell not to moch for makyng of a fabull” (161). Becoming well socialized here too is about managing dirt, “matter out of place,” a clause from William James made famous by Mary Douglas;[11] that is, a well-trained boy should not dirty the air with his pointless words. There is no training here in how to speak well; no guidance in flattering the interests of another, in making yourself favorably memorable; what you are meant to be is sober, well spoken, which is to say, nearly silent, to know how to use everything, and to manage your entrances and exits well. Here too I think is a kind of penetralia, something discrete, considered part of the furniture.

And at last Chris. This text is entirely new to me, so I’m somewhat more at sea. Your treatment of Sloan 3854 – still not online! I checked – argues for its actual transformational power. It makes something happen. I am reminded of something indelible Anna Kłosowska wrote in her Queer Love in the Middle Ages, namely, “all fiction corresponds to an absolute reality—not of existence, but of desire that calls fiction into being, performed by the authors and manuscript makers; and continuing desire for it performed by readers, a desire that sustains the book’s material presence across the centuries” (7). The desire that interests Kłosowska differs from what Chris is studying, but the resonances are, I hope, obvious.

The Sworn Book aims to produce a beatific vision, which, in Robert Mathiesen’s words are “a vision of God Almighty in All His Glory, during which the viewer can (one presumes) even participate to some extent in God’s omniscience.”[12] As I understand it, debates about the beatific vision during the period of the production of the Sworn Book – which may be as early as the mid thirteenth century[13] — concerned when it took place and the relation between viewer and the object of sight. Again, as I understand it, the most cautious argument was that the vision could occur only after Judgment Day, while what we might call the most reckless assessment held that (and here I am quoting Ayelet Even-Ezra) “the soul becomes identical to what it sees—namely, God.”[14] So the goal of the Sworn Book may well be to jump the line on the beatific vision, and through that, not only to attain the greatest gift of the blessed, to be face to face with God, but perhaps to gain still more, a kind of participatory deification. What does the Sworn Book tell us that we can do if we get this? “All knowledge…innumerable treasures” and conversation with incorporeal beings.[15]

While that kind of success may well be unlikely, there’s another success that Chris’s paper concerns. He’s interested in the poetics of the ritual and belief, a way of engaging with writing and recitations and self and time that produce a density of sense or importance that is in some way beyond full reduction to meaning. I am reminded of my engagement with some contemporary poetry, like Claire Devoogd’s Via, the kind of text that Ryan Ruby’s verse history of poetry, Context Collapse, talks about as “inevitably more resistant / to interpretation than closed texts… / confronted with such texts, even the best / close readers find themselves reduced to typing / descriptions of their physical features.” I love DeVoogd’s poetry but I’m not sure I get it. So too, mutatis mutandis, with the Sworn Book’s long passages of what seem to be gibberish words, combined with as precisely enacted gibberish in the construction of its sigils.

Richard Kieckhefer spoke of the Sworn Book’s participation in what he terms “devotionalism,” which he distinguishes from contemplation. Contemplatives were often indifferent to practical devotion. Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls, for instance, could not be more indifferent to what we’re supposed to do with our body and speech on our pathway to self-annihilation and union with God. It is not, though, that the Sworn Book is wholly “devotional.”[16] As thick as it is with ritual, it fuses, as Kieckhefer argues, devotionalism with contemplation. It produces an altered state of consciousness.

So, finally, I think of Jordan Kirk’s interest in his Medieval Nonsense in the “vox non-significativa,” syllables that mean nothing, like Chaucer’s chicken noises or his flourish of alliterative syllables. The distinction between nonsignifying language and the massive blocks of what looks like gibberish that comprise the Sworn Book’s incantations, or prayers, is that this gibberish does not aim to produce nothing. If someone were to get through the instructions over the near month that they require, undergoing more than a little ascetic deprivation, much presumably would have happened. Not the beatific vision, surely, but some other kind of altered state, one that would have “turned their brains in their heads.”[17] And I’m wondering, at last, if Chris might want to address that.

Thanks for listening.

  1. See the Gutenberg printing here: https://archive.org/details/summaqueuocaturc00balb/page/n478/mode/1up ↑
  2. Cambridge Trinity College O.5.4, 221v. The edition in Wright and Wülcker, Anglo-Saxon and Old English Dictionaries (2nd ed, 1884) misleads by presenting the manuscript as a continuous stream of Latin words each paired with its own English definition. The English is in fact much rarer in the manuscript. For further discussion, Reiko Takeda, “Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS. O.5.4: A Fifteenth-Century Pedagogical Dictionary?,” Historical Dictionaries and Historical Dictionary Research: Papers from teh International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology, at the University of Leicester, 2002, ed. Julie Coleman and Anne McDermott (Max Niemeyer, 2004), 11-18 ↑
  3. MED entry (s.v., “rascaile,” is here). ↑
  4. For one approach to some of these, Sarah Novak, “Braying peasants and the poet as prophet: Gower and the people in the Vox clamantis,” Études anglaises 66 (2013): 311-322. So far as I tell, this article may have been Novak’s only publication. Too bad! ↑
  5. Richard Fitzneale, Dialogus de Scaccario, ed. and trans. Charles Johnson, rev. ed. F. E. L. Carter and Diana E. Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 60 ↑
  6. Available in TEAMS in the Ashmole 61 edition, here; also in Ten Bourdes, here. ↑
  7. Myra Seaman, Objects of Affection: The Book and Household in Late Medieval England (Manchester UP, 2021), 238. ↑
  8. The famous ‘broken hammer’ of Latour or was it Heidegger. ↑
  9. James McNellis III The Uncollated Manuscripts of The Master of Game: Notes towards a New Edition (University of Washington PhD Thesis, 1996), 274. This remains the best edition. McNellis (RIP) was unable to publish it during his lifetime. ↑
  10. Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child (U of Minnesota P, 2014), 147, 150 ↑
  11. James, Variety of Religious Experience (Modern Library, 1929) 131; Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 164 and elsewhere ↑
  12. “A Thirteenth-Century Ritual to attain the beatific vision from the Sworn Book of Honorius of Thebes,” in: Claire Fanger, ed., Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Pennsylvania State UP, 1998), 143-162 [150] ↑
  13. Jan R. Veenstra, “Honorius and the Sigil of God: The Liber Iuratus in Berengario Ganell’s Summa sacre magice,” in Claire Fanger, ed. Invoking angels: Theurgic ideas and practices, thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Penn State Press, 2012, 151-91. ↑
  14. Ecstasy in the Classroom: Trance, Self, and the Academic Profession in Medieval Paris. Fordham University Press, 2019, 83. See eg Aquinas Summa T, supplement Q92, art 1, “Will the saints see God in his essence,” “For since the intellect in act is somewhat one with the intelligible object in act, it would seem difficult to understand how the created intellect is made to be an uncreated essence.” ↑
  15. Sworn Book of Honorius, trans. Joseph Peterson (Ibis Press, 2016), 301. ↑
  16. Richard Kieckhefer, “The Devil’s Contemplatives: The Liber iuratus, the Liber visionum, and Christian Appropriation of Jewish Occultism,” in Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, ed. Claire Fanger (Pennsylvania State UP, 1998), 250-265 [251] ↑
  17. Cloud of Unknowing, which warns against those who “travayle theire ymaginacion so undiscreetly, that at the laste thei turne here brayne in here hedes.” Patrick Gallagher, ed, for TEAMS, Chapter 52, lines 1813-14. See Daniel McCann “Bad Sheep: References to Brain Infections in the Cloud of Unknowing,” Notes and Queries 68.2 (June 2021): 166-67. ↑
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