Marvels of reading : essays in honour of professor Andrzej Wicher

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Magdalena Wandzioch Referee

Marta Gibińska

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The present volume celebrates the sixtieth birthday anniversary of one of Poland’s most prolific and significant professors of English literature, Andrzej Wicher. His work and his persona are being honoured here by authors who are all either Professor Wicher’s long-time friends and collaborators, or students and disciples who, with time, gained his appreciation and friendship. Each and every person who contributed to Marvels of Reading extends their gratitude for his scholarly achievement and their heartfelt wishes to Professor Wicher. In their individual ways, the contributors of the volume celebrate his academic achievement by texts whose themes share Professor Wicher’s manifold interests and un- dertakings.

It is since the late nineteen-seventies that Andrzej Wicher has marked his academic presence, first in Polish studies of English literature and then worldwide, in the studies of English medieval literature in particular. He graduated from the University of Silesia in 1978 and since then the scope of his research and writing has been on the one hand vast, on the other it has consistently shown his distinctive style that, in its attention to detail and remarkable erudition, may be likened to the style of the old school of scholars of English, the likes of J. R. R. Tolkien and Nevill Coghill. As a young academic, Andrzej Wicher researched supernatural elements of fairy tales and his most recent book is devoted to the fathers of fantasy literature – Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. One may be tempted, therefore, to say that his career has come full circle, but given the produc- tivity of Professor Wicher and given what is another of his characteristic traits, his ceaseless ability to find wonder in matters literary, this circle is far from being completed.

If one were to categorise and catalogue Andrzej Wicher’s research over the nearly forty years of his university career, one can see several distinc-

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tive areas marked by the milestones of his scholarly books: Archeology of the Sublime: Studies in Late-Medieval English Writings (Katowice 1995);

Shakespeare’s Parting Wondertales: A Study of the Elements of the Tale of Magic in William Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Łódź 2003); and Selected Me- dieval and Religious Themes in the Works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (Łódź 2013). Aside from these publications, he has authored some seven- ty articles published in Polish and international learned journals, as well as collections of essays. Particularly worthy of note is Andrzej Wicher’s translation of Tolkien’s rendition of the Gawain-poet’s works into Eng- lish. It was published in 1997 as Pan Gawen i Zielony Rycerz, Perła, Król Orfeo and remains an unparalleled example of Professor Wicher’s skill in transposing alliteration and fourteenth-century English rhyming schemes into Polish, a language to which they are essentially alien.

Professor Wicher’s journey through English literature began with the fantastic worlds of Tolkien in his works on Tolkienian utopias and my- thology of the Silmarillion. This gave natural rise to a broader interest in tales of magic as well as in folk and fairy tales which Andrzej Wicher studied not only in the works of Tolkien, but increasingly also in Middle English literature, most notably in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Middle English romances and drama. In this relatively early period of Professor Wicher’s work one may notice marks of the intellectual environment of friends and collaborators from the then Institute of English Philology, University of Silesia: what is discernible there is a degree of fascination with theoretical approaches to literary studies, which Andrzej Wicher shared with Wojciech Kalaga, Tadeusz Sławek, Tadeusz Rachwał, the late Emanuel Prower, and Ewa Borkowska. Yet it is also around this time that Professor Wicher’s interests in the Renaissance would manifest themselves, first in his research of Thomas More’s Utopia. Several years later these interests led him towards working with Shakespearean drama. Before Andrzej Wicher became pre- occupied with Shakespeare, however, he completed a pioneering work on the category of the Sublime in the Middle Ages, very favourably reviewed by one of the greatest authorities on Chaucer and the fourteenth cen- tury, Piero Boitani. Archeology of the Sublime may be, perhaps, considered a culmination of Andrzej Wicher’s research to its date (1995) – a work

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that discussed, among other issues, medieval dream visions which, by their very nature, resorted to the supernatural elements.

From then onwards, in the second half of the nineteen-nineties and early two thousands, Professor Wicher, by then already invested with his habilitation, moved, as it were, forward in time in terms of the works and authors he studied. This move coincided with leaving his native Silesia and settling in the University of Łódź, in the Department of Studies in Drama and Pre-1800 English Literature where Professor Wicher works to date. He made several excursions into the works of Adam Smith, Joseph von Eichendorff, Johann von Goethe, but his chief concern then was with William Shakespeare. It was, however, a concern which organically developed from his earlier academic passions: what Professor Wicher researched were Shakespeare’s “tales of magic,” which he aptly called Shakespeare’s Parting Wondertales (2003). Andrzej Wicher’s study of Shakespeare was by no means limited to the plays he probed into in his book; he discussed other Shakespearean dramas and the Renaissance in general, as well as Old Polish poetry and fourteenth-century English mysticism.

Professor Wicher’s long-term fascination with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, perhaps stemming also from a certain affinity between souls and ways of thinking, resurfaces in the most recent research undertak- en by him. In a manner that is both scholarly and personal, Professor Wicher carefully discusses a range of themes present in the writings of both of these authors, becoming one of Poland’s most important scholarly authority on the writers who continue to shape contemporary popular imagination and the fantasy genre. Professor Wicher, in his distinctively erudite manner, approaches them and the literary, philosophical, moral, and religious contexts of their novels and short stories.

Professor Andrzej Wicher is not only one of the most accomplished Polish scholars of English literature; he has also been an important or- ganizer of academic life, coordinating numerous international confer- ences, seminars, and workshops, collaborating in this with internation- ally-renowned scholars. Futhermore, one may be tempted to claim that Professor Wicher has also created his own school in medieval, drama, and fantasy studies. He supervised a great number of M.A. dissertations;

several of his M.A. students as well as his Ph.D. students have success-

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fully completed doctoral dissertations and now work independently in leading Polish academic institutions. They are profoundly grateful to Professor Wicher not only for the supervision of their dissertations, but also for the peculiar scholarly sensitivity that they learnt from him.

Marvels of Reading is indeed what he instilled in many of this volume’s contributors.

The volume comprises texts that deal with Middle English, Old English, and Germanic literatures, various versions of medievalism, Shakespearean, Miltonic, and folk-tale inspirations, and with Andrzej Wicher’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into Polish. In the medieval studies sec- tion Liliana Sikorska traces the relationship between medieval travelling and purgatorial perspective in The Book of Margery Kempe and its contextu- al sources. Bartłomiej Błaszkiewicz deals with the Prose Merlin in the man- ner that exposes the text’s preoccupation with magic, but also places it side by side with Of Arthour and Merlin and Malory’s work. Rafał Borysławski probes into the meanings of wealth in Old English gnomic poetry, while Łukasz Neubauer attempts a close reading of Old Saxon Hêliand, looking into the cultural and religious amalgam that it is.

The part devoted to medievalisms starts with Ewa Borkowska’s discussion of the idea of the “enchanted world” as opposed to the disenchanted, secularized, one in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry and Charles Taylor’s philosophy. Anna Czarnowus focuses on the concept of ethnic difference intersecting with the gender one in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale and its BBC adaptation.

In the next section Tadeusz Sławek situates the vision of a community as a melancholy-based entity in its philosophical context only to proceed to the exploration of the vision in As You Like It. Maria Błaszkiewicz dis- cusses the farcical potential of Miltonic epic and its position of the prede- cessor of mock-heroic poetry, and Jacek Mydla analyses the structure and focalizations of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol.

The final section, devoted to Andrzej Wicher’s seminal translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo sees Barbara Kowa- lik delving into the miraculous elements of Sir Gawain and Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, whereas Piotr Spyra focuses on the interpretative potential of Professor Wicher’s translation of the Arthurian romance.

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May this congratulatory and laudatory tome be a mark of friendship, gratitude, and appreciation shared by its contributors towards Professor Andrzej Wicher. Ad multos annos, Dear Andrzej! Ad multos annos, Dear Friend!

Rafał Borysławski, Anna Czarnowus

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by Professor Andrzej Wicher

Monographs

Archeology of the Sublime: Studies in Late-Medieval English Writings. Katowice:

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1995.

Shakespeare’s Parting Wondertales: A Study of the Elements of the Tale of Magic in William Shakespeare’s Late Plays. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódz- kiego, 2003.

Selected Medieval and Religious Themes in the Works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tol - kien. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Łódzkiego Towarzystwa Naukowego, 2013.

Translation

J. R. R. Tolkien, Pan Gawen i Zielony Rycerz, Perła, Król Orfeo. Translated by Andrzej Wicher. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Amber, 1997.

Chapters in edited volumes

“A Structural Study of Dehumanization in H. G. Wells’s Early Novels.” In The Image of War in the Anglo-American Literature of the 20th Century, edited by Maria Łobzowska. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1983.

“British Fairy Tales: The Problem of Classification.” In Studies–Analyses–Interpre- tations, edited by Maria Łobzowska. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1984.

„Irracjonalizm baśni.” In Interpretacje i style krytyki, edited by Wojciech H. Kalaga and Tadeusz Sławek. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1988.

“The Fairy Tale Hero and Martin Heidegger’s Ideal of Man: An Interpretation of M. Lüthi’s Das Europäische Volksmärchen.” In Discourse and Character, edited by Wojciech H. Kalaga and Tadeusz Sławek. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1990.

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“The Tale of Magic as a Model of the Poetic Discourse (A Methodological Prop- osition).” In Discourses–Texts–Contexts, edited by Wojciech H. Kalaga and Tade usz Sławek. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1990.

“Freedom vs. Intolerance: Variations on the Theme of Supernatural Wives and Husbands.” In “We Are All Indians”: Violence–Intolerance–Literature, edited by Wojciech H. Kalaga and Tadeusz Sławek. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwer- sytetu Śląskiego, 1990.

„Myślenie o czasie w Utopii Tomasza More’a.” In Facta Ficta: Z zagadnień dys- kursu historii, edited by Wojciech H. Kalaga and Tadeusz Sławek. Katowice:

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1992.

“Border as Order and as Disorder: An Interpretation of the Metaphor of the Border in the Writings of Isaiah Berlin.” In Boundary of Borders, edited by Tadeusz Sławek. Cieszyn: Wydawnictwo PROART, 1992.

“Some Aspects of ‘Racism’ in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” In Intro- ducing South African Writing, edited by Zbigniew Białas and Krzysztof Kowal- czyk. Cieszyn: Wydawnictwo PROART, 1992.

“The Book of the Duchess: A Study in Feudalism.” In The Mechanisms of Power, edited by Teresa Pyzik. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1993.

“Piers Plowman, the Sublime.” In The Most Sublime Act: Essays on the Sublime, edited by Tadeusz Rachwał and Tadeusz Sławek. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1994.

“The Mixture of the Sacred and the Profane in Secunda Pastorum (The Second Wakefield Shepherd’s Play) and in De Purificatione Beatae Virginis (The Purifi- cation and Christ with the Doctors).” In Między średniowieczem a renesansem.

Kolokwia polsko-włoskie, vol. 1, edited by Jan Malicki and Piotr Wilczek.

Kato wice: Wydawnictwo Śląsk, 1994.

„Polemika wokół starości, czyli pochwała metafizyki.” In Starość: Wybór materiałów z VII Konferencji Pracowników Naukowych i Studentów Instytutu Nauk o Litera turze Polskiej Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, edited by Aleksander Nawa- recki and Adam Dziadek. Katowice: Górnośląska Macierz Kultury, 1995.

“Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand: A Study in the 18th-century Magical Think- ing.” In Word. Subject. Nature: Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Culture, edited by Tadeusz Rachwał and Tadeusz Sławek. Katowice:

Wydawnic two Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1996.

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“Sounding the Limits of Eroticism: An Interpretation of G. Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale.” In Representations of the Erotic, edited by Tadeusz Rachwał and Tadeusz Sławek. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1996.

“In Pursuit of the ‘Real Difference’: A Study of the Medieval Roots of National Identity.” In Culture and Identity: Selected Aspects and Approaches, edited by Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Tadeusz Sławek, Tadeusz Rachwał, and Roger White- house. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1996.

„Obroty koła dantejskiej fortuny.” In Po Dantem: Wybór materiałów z VIII Konfe- rencji Pracowników Naukowych i Studentów Instytutu Nauk o Literaturze Pol skiej Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, edited by Józef Olejniczak. Katowice: Górnośląskie Centrum Kultury, 1996.

„«Śląskość», «niemieckość» i «baśniowość» opowiadania Josepha von Eichen- dorffa Z życia nicponia.” In Śląsk Inaczej: Materiały I Sesji Śląskoznawczej Pracowników Naukowych i Studentów Wydziału Filologicznego Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, edited by Tomasz Głogowski and Marian Kisiel. Katowice: Towa- rzystwo Zachęty Kultury, 1997.

“Wildness and Revolution in Joseph von Eichendorff’s Das Schloß Dürande.”

In The Wild and the Tame: Essays in Cultural Practice, edited by Wojciech H. Kalaga and Tadeusz Rachwał. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1997.

“‘The lopped branches’: An Interpretation of the Motif of Magic Forgetfulness in William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Pericles.” In Memory–Remembering–

Forgetting, edited by Wojciech H. Kalaga and Tadeusz Rachwał. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, New York, Paris, Wien: Peter Lang – Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1999.

“‘The most unkindest cut of all’: Models of Prejudice in Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.” In: Jewish Themes in English and Polish Culture, edited by Irena Janicka-Świderska, Jerzy Jarniewicz, and Adam Sumera. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2000.

“J. R. R. Tolkien’s Quarrel with Modernity.” In Signs of Culture: Simulacra and the Real, edited by Wojciech H. Kalaga and Tadeusz Rachwał. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, New York, Paris, Wien: Peter Lang – Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2000.

“The Polish Model of Religiousness.” In Historical, Cultural, Socio-Politi- cal and Economic Perspectives on Europe, edited by Suzanne Stern-Gillet

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and M. Teresa Lunati. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000.

“Adam Mickiewicz’s Use of the Myth of the Organic Unity as an Antidote to Rootlessness.” In Exile: Displacements and Misplacements, edited by Woj ciech H. Kalaga and Tadeusz Rachwał. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, New York, Paris, Wien: Peter Lang – Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2001.

“The ‘Infantile’ Aspects of the 14th-Century English Mysticism. An Intro- ductory Study.” In Studies in Literature and Culture – In Honour of Professor Irena Janicka-Świderska, edited by Maria Edelson. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwer sytetu Łódzkiego, 2002.

“Shakespeare’s Henry VIII as a Subversive Fable.” In British Drama Through the Ages and Medieval Literature, edited by Jadwiga Uchman and Andrzej Wicher.

Łódź: Wydawnictwo Biblioteka, 2003.

„Wcielenia Meluzyny w literaturze średniowiecznej Anglii.” In Mediewistyka literacka w Polsce, edited by Teresa Michałowska. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Badań Literackich, 2003.

„Literatura średniowiecznej Anglii.” In Historia literatury światowej w dziesięciu tomach, vol. II, part I “Średniowiecze,” edited by Tadeusz Skoczek. Bochnia, Kraków, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo SMS, 2004.

“The Breton Lay and the Tale of Magic: A Preliminary Attempt at Arriving at the Internal Unity and Ideology of Selected Breton Lays.” In Medieval English Mirror: For the Love of Inglis Lede, edited by Liliana Sikorska and Marcin Krygier. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien:

Peter Lang – Europäische Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2004.

“Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale Seen in the Context of the Tales about Calumniated Women.” In Medieval English Mirror: Naked Wordes in Englissh, edited by Liliana Sikorska and Marcin Krygier. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, Peter Lang – Europäische Verlag der Wissen- schaften, 2005.

„Literatura renesansowej Anglii.” In Historia literatury światowej w dziesięciu tomach, vol. III “Renesans,” edited by Tadeusz Skoczek. Bochnia, Kraków, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo SMS, 2005.

“The Dialectic of ‘Ease’ and ‘Disease’: Some Remarks on the Use of Words and on Cultural Diversity in Bruno Schulz’s Writings.” In Multiculturalism:

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For and Against, edited by Andrzej Wicher. Łódź: Wyższa Szkoła Humani- styczno-Ekonomiczna w Łodzi, 2005.

“W. Shkespeare’s and J. Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen as a Discussion of Cultural Diversity.” In Narrating the Other: Cultures and Perspectives, edited by Wojciech H. Kalaga and Marzena Kubisz. Częstochowa: Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Lingwistycznej, 2005.

“The Motif of the Bear: On the Relationship between W. Shakespeare’s The Win- ter’s Tale and the Tale of Magic.” In Enjoying the Spectacle: Word, Image, Gesture – Essays in Honour of Professor Marta Wiszniowska, edited by Jerzy Sobieraj and Dariusz Pestka. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2006.

“The Theme of Friendship in The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis.” In „Zobaczyć świat w ziarenku piasku...”: O przyjaźni, pamięci i wyobraźni – Tom jubileu- szowy dla Profesora Tadeusza Sławka, edited by Ewa Borkowska and Małgorzata Nitka. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2006.

“‘Nylon, Lipstick, and Invitations’: On the Question of Identity in Narnia.”

In Myśl wędrująca – Księga pamiątkowa dla Tadeusza Sławka, edited by Ilona Dobosiewicz, Jacek Gutorow, and Ryszard W. Wolny. Opole: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Opolskiego, 2006.

“Some Remarks on the Serpent Symbolism in G. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.”

In English Language Literature and Culture (Selected Papers from the 13th PASE Conference, Poznań 2004), edited by Jacek Fisiak, Radosław Dylewski, and Dagmara Krzyżaniak. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Adama Mic kie- wicza, 2006.

“Of the Holy Serpent and the Well: Some Remarks on Serpent Symbolism in Chaucer’s House of Fame and Troilus and Criseyde.” In Studies in English Drama and Poetry, vol. 1 “Reading English Drama and Poetry,” edited by Joanna Kazik. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2007.

“Some Boethian and Ecclesiological Themes in C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters.”

In Medievalisms: The Poetics of Literary Re-Reading, edited by Liliana Sikorska.

Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, New York, Paris, Wien: Peter Lang – Interna- tionaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2008.

“J. R. R. Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham as an Anti-Beowulf: A Study in Tolkien’s Comicality.” In Shades of Humour, edited by Alina Kwiatkowska and Sylwia Dżereń-Głowacka. Piotrków Trybunalski: Naukowe Wydawnictwo Piotr ko-

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wskie przy Filii Uniwersytetu Humanistyczno-Przyrodniczego Jana Kocha- nowskiego w Kielcach, 2008.

“The Image of Hell as a Hidden City in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.” In Images of the City, edited by Agnieszka Rasmus and Magdalena Cieślak. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009.

“Some Thoughts on Political Correctness and on the Possibility of a Civilised Version of ‘Political Incorrectness’ Exemplified by Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus.” In Political Correctness: Mouth Wide Shut?, edited by Woj ciech H. Kalaga, Jacek Mydla, and Katarzyna Ancuta. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, New York, Paris, Wien: Peter Lang – Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2009.

“Tolkien’s Indolent Kings: Echoes of Medieval History in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” In Medieval English Mirror: þe Laurer of Oure Englische Tonge, edited by Liliana Sikorska and Marcin Krygier. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang – Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2009.

“Some Gender Aspects of the Motif of Penance in Selected Middle English Romances.” In Medieval English Mirror: Thise Stories Beren Witnesse. The Land- scape of the Afterlife in Medieval and Post-Medieval Imagination, edited by Liliana Sikorska. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang – Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2010.

“The Dialectic of the Interior and the Exterior in Tolkien’s Story of Beren and Lúthien (in the Light of its Relationship to the Tales of Magic).”

In Inside-Out. Discourses of Interiority and Worldmaking Imagination, edited by Zbigniew Białas, Paweł Jędrzejko, and Karolina Lebek. Bielsko- -Biała: University of Economics and Humanities, 2011.

“The Uncanny Use of Metaphors in 14th-Century English Mystical Writings on the Basis of Selected Examples.” In The Familiar Becomes Frightening (The Notion of the Uncanny in Language and Culture), edited by Andrzej Wicher. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Akademii Humanistyczno-Ekonomicznej, 2012.

“What Does Tolkien Argue for in ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics?’

An Attempt at a Metacriticism.” In O What a Tangled Web: Tolkien and Medieval Literature. A View from Poland, edited by Barbara Kowalik.

Zürich, Jena: Walking Tree Publishers, 2013.

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“The Discourse of Orientalism in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.” In Reading Subversion and Transgression, vol. 3 (Studies in Culture and Literature Series), edited by Paulina Mirowska and Joanna Kazik. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwer- sytetu Łódzkiego, 2013.

“The Fairy Needlewoman Emaré: A Study of the Middle English Romance Emaré in the Context of the Tale of Magic.” In Medieval English Mirror:

Evur happie & glorious, ffor I hafe at will grete riches, edited by Liliana Sikorska and Marcin Krygier. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang – Internationaler Verlag der Wissen- schaften, 2013.

Articles in journals

“The Disturbed Utopia of The Lord of the Rings by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (An Essay on the Understanding of Tragicality).” Prace Historyczno-Literackie 15 „Filologia Angielska” (1980).

“The Artificial Mythology of The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien.” Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny XXVIII 3–4 (1981).

“A Discussion of the Archetype of the Supernatural Husband and the Super- natural Wife as It Appears in Some of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.”

REAL (Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature) 7 (1990).

“Patterns of Thinking in Medieval Romances: An Interpretation of The Wooing of Etaine and Sir Orfeo.” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 25 (1992).

“In a World Where Ends Collide: Romantic Discrepancies in the Thought of Isaiah Berlin.” History of European Ideas 20/1–3 (1995).

„Znak niedźwiedzia, albo związki między Opowieścią zimową Szekspira a baśnią magiczną.” Sprawozdania z czynności i posiedzeń naukowych LII (1998).

“Hamlet as an ‘Ash-Boy’, i.e. a Male Cinderella.” Anglica: Approaches to Literature, Culture and Language, vol. 9 (1999).

„Myślenie «oczne» u G. M. Hopkinsa (próba analizy intertekstualnej).” Kwar- talnik Neofilologiczny XLI/3–4 (1999).

“The Fourteenth-Century Mystics as God’s Children: An Introductory Cognitive Study.” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 35 (2000).

“The Idea of Cultural Continuity in G. Chaucer’s House of Fame.” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 36 (2001).

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“The Antinomies of Eating in the Middle Ages as Exemplified by Słota’s Poem About Behaviour at the Table.” English Philology: Zeszyty Naukowe Wyższej Szkoły Humanistyczno-Ekonomicznej w Łodzi (2002).

“W. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Context of Folklore Studies.” Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny LII/4 (2005).

“The Ambiguities of The Tempest: On the Relation between Shakespeare’s Play and its Folk-Tale Background.” Studies in English Philology 1/1 (2006).

„Archetyp «władcy gnuśnego» we Władcy pierścieni J. R. R. Tolkiena.” Aiglos.

Almanach Tolkienowski 9 (2007/2008).

“‘The Dread of Something after Death’: The Relationship between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Some Medieval Dream Visions and Ghost Stories.” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 45 (2009).

“Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Tale of the Enchanted Pear-Tree and Sir Orfeo as Eroticised Versions of the Folktales about Supernatural Wives.” Text Matters. A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture 3 (2013) “Eroticism and Its Discontents.”

Book review

“Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare (edited by Scott L. Newstock).” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 45 (2009).

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Adam Mickiewicz University

Margery Kempe’s Roman (Purgatorial) Holiday,

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or on Penance and Pleasure in Medieval Journeys

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Trusteth there-for, ye folk of euery age, That yowrelyff her ys but a pylgrymage;

Fforlykpylgrymes ye passé to and ffro, WhosIoyeyseueremeynt A-mong with wo.

Al worldly blysse, medlydys with stryff;

Ffor ay the cours, of thys mortal lyff.

The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, Lydgate’s Prologue, ll. 45–50

On Station Island in Lough Derg, Co. Donegal, there is a place reputed to have been shown to St. Patrick by God as the gate to the Otherworld.

Such knowledge (and special favour) was to help Patrick to convert the pagan Irish. According to popular belief, disseminated from the thir- teenth century onwards, whoever spent twenty-four hours in the cave, known as the pit of Purgatory, would cleanse his or her soul so that after death this person was spared the pains of Purgatory. The earliest account of this story is found in the Latin Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii (c. 1180–1184), composed by a Cistercian monk, Henry Sawtry (Saltrey).¹ The text tells the story of an Irish knight² named Owein, and his spiritual passage (which is actually retold as a real journey) through Purgatory and the Earthly Paradise, to which the cave’s entrance was believed to give access. The increasing popularity of the tripartite division of the Other-

1 St Patrick’s Purgatory, ed. Robert Easting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, EETS, 1991), xviii.

2 An acquaintance of mine, an Irish fellow, said that there were no knights in medieval Ireland, and yet the text talks very specifically about a “knight.”

* My title is obviously a playful reference to the Hollywood classic Roman Holiday (1953, directed by William Wyler, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck).

** I am grateful to Joanna Jarząb, PhD who has helped me with the change of the stylesheet and pointed to several missing references.

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world coincided with the rising interest in the defining and analyzing of sins and transgressions, following the transformation from the public into the required private confession.³ Purgatory thus began to serve as a scarecrow to each and every Christian, as even the righteous ones were stained by Original Sin, and therefore were subject to lesser or harsher purgatorial purification. Nonetheless, whereas ordinary people endured the said cleansing after death, Christian saints underwent purgatorial trials on earth. One form of such voluntary suffering was pilgrimage and voluntary exile, in which the dangers connected with travelling were aux- iliary to the process of penance.

Various hallowed places were deemed perilous; still, medieval Europe was a map of sacred sights, an atlas of impossible longings⁴ for those who, on the one hand, were driven by the need to atone for their transgres- sions, and on the other, by sinful curiositas branded as yet another sin by St. Augustine, John Cassian, and their followers and commentators.⁵ The scrutiny of such journeys connected with curiositas, or in more con- temporary terms, Wanderlust, is also found in Langland’s Piers Plowman, containing the denunciation of pilgrimages.⁶ The Holy Land was in the hands of infidels, while other European destinations frequented by pious pilgrims swarmed with robbers and conmen, who lived off the pilgrims.

This, however, did not diminish the popularity of such places, which, as the work by John Capgrave (1393–1464) suggests, obviously had more

3 I am referring here to the decree Omnis utriusque sexus issued by Pope Innocent III in 1215. It was St. Augustine who provided early Christian communities with the definition and classification of sins. See Mary Flowers Braswell, The Medieval Sinner (London and Toronto: Associated Univer- sity Presses, 1983); Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago:

The University of Chicago Press), 70.

4 I have borrowed this expression from Anuradha Roy’s novel entitled An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008).

5 Richard Newhauser, Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages (London:

Ashgate/Variorum, 2007), 99–124.

6 The title character is both referred to as Piers Plowman as well as Piers the Ploughman: “Pyl- grimis & palmers plyȝten hem to-gederes,/ To seche seint Iame and seyntys of rome,/ Wenten forth in hure way with meny vn-wyse tale[s],/ And hauen leue to lye al hure lyf-tyme” (47–50); William Langland, The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman Together with Vita de Dowel, Dobet et Dobest. Secundum Wit et Resoun. Text C, ed. Walter W. Skeat (London, New York, and Toronto:

Oxford University Press, 1873), 3.

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attractions than simply penitential travelling. Capgrave’s Ye Solace of Pil- grims, the first travelogue written approximately one hundred fifty years after the first Jubilee Year 1300, is a curious mixture of the sacred and the profane. Capgrave wrote this book after his visit to Rome in 1451 so as to aid Christian pilgrims in their peregrinations. The text charts sacred spaces in the city. Moreover, the city is presented as an amalgam of the real and the historical/tourist places, such as the palaces of Trajan and Hadrian, the Coliseum; the mythological sites such as the tombs of Remus and Romulus and the sacred, including churches and shrines of Chris- tians. Here, one can easily notice that Capgrave, a monk and a person of the church himself, sees the religious through the secular, paying tribute to the city’s ancient monuments, thus providing us with the very first description of tourist attractions. The work itself owes a lot, to put it mildly, to the hugely popular medieval Latin text of Mirabilia Urbis Romae, most probably written by a canon of St. Peter’s around 1140.⁷ Capgrave’s Life of St. Augustine (1451), written approximately at the same time as Ye Solace of Pilgrims (1450), presents Rome as a place of misfortune. In an earlier text, The Book of Margery Kempe (1420) Rome becomes the site of Margery Kempe’s (1373–1439) purgatorial trials, at the same time serving as the location for her Hollywood-style wedding ceremony with Christ. Similar to Augustine, Margery Kempe is an itinerant saint; her Roman adventures will be examined in relation to the above-mentioned works by Capgrave.

John Lydgate’s translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s The Pilgrim- age of the Life of Man (1426) captured the ideas ever present in Christian- ity, which began with the Pauline statement that Christians are strangers in this world, doomed to everlasting peregrination until they reach a safe haven in the celestial city.⁸ Lydgate recurrently evoked the labyrinthine

7 Mirabilia Urbis Romae was originally edited and translated by Francis Morgan Nichols in 1889; Mirabilia Urbis Romae [The Marvels of Rome], ed. and trans. Francis Morgan Nichols. Sec- ond edition with New Introduction, Gazetteer and Bibliography by Eileen Gardiner (New York:

Ithalica Press, 1986).

8 For medieval mind, pilgrimage stood for the human search for the divine. Every man does the reckoning and has to prepare for the last journey. Julian of Norwich, as do other mystics, embarks on a journey within herself. Dorothea of Montau (1347–1394) travels from Marienwerder and Danzig to Aachen and Rome, only to find her journey’s end in an anchorage in the cathedral in Kwidzyn.

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imagery associated with choosing the right paths and rejecting the wrong ones. As penitents they travel for spiritual enlightenment,⁹ their direc- tion is always heavenward, and the ultimate reward is everlasting bliss.

Before one is worthy of such a reward, however, one has to fight various internal and external negative forces. On their long and winding road, pilgrims have to learn to discern the truth and not be distracted by attractions which the world – one of the three enemies of mankind – lures them with. In Lydgate’s text metaphorical meaning is frequently presented through down-to-earth metaphors of combat, torture, suffering, and dangers, otherwise conceptualized as purgatorial tribulations.

Since the early Christian times, the penitential literature has established punishments for various transgressions; one of them was pilgrimage and exile. Cain was frequently drawn as an outcast. Medieval voyages, therefore, have to be seen as the juxtaposition between ascent and descent, alienation and belonging. Both heavenly joys and hellish punishments were timeless, whereas Purgatory was conceptualized as existing in time.

The Bible, thus, provided Christians with their most significant symbols, those of exile (life) and home (Paradise).

Early Christian thinkers envisioned the “interim” place, Purgatory, as established in a temporal sense. The cleansing of a soul happened within prescribed time. As was already mentioned, the passage through Purga- tory, augmented by the symbolism of fire rejuvenating and cleansing, created a picture of a general “clean-up” before one’s soul reached heaven.

9 As to the journey motif, medieval tradesmen and travellers search for material goods and tes- tify to the wonders of the world (The Travels of Sir John Mandeville can be compared with Caxton’s Mirror of the World, which included equally fantastic descriptions, for example of India).

The Grand Tour can be seen as the beginning of tourism: the early travellers to Italy, France, and Greece were searching for the picturesque. The Grand Tour marks the beginning of the theories of landscape. Romantic pilgrims search for classical ruins, the remains of classical culture and literature, i.e. Virgil’s tomb, and the beauty of the natural world, while the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century travelogues frequently compare cultures. Their descriptions of the world enter into the discussion of the sublime and beautiful. It was the dreariness of ruins and their seclusion, their marginality in contemporary urban culture that attracted the neo-pilgrims. For more, see Nichola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

One finds a typically Lodge-like humour in a contemporary rendition of the medieval pilgrim- age in David Lodge’s Therapy; David Lodge, Therapy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1995).

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Thus, medieval penitents willingly underwent suffering on Earth, believ- ing it would make their sojourn in Purgatory less painful. It is commonly acknowledged that Greek and Roman motifs of the descent into Hell, most memorable in The Odyssey and The Aeneid, established European ideas about the afterlife. Yet, the noun “Purgatory” did not exist until the twelfth century.¹⁰ Although Christian dogmas of resurrection and immortality were developed quite early, it was not until the later Mid- dle Ages that theologians began asking questions about the intermediary stage between death and resurrection. Concurrently, the dissemination of Christian teaching concerning venial sins contributed to the appearance of doctrines about Purgatory. “Broadly speaking, Purgatory developed as the place where venial sins might be expurgated […].”¹¹ Medieval Chris- tians as well as their priests, bishops, prelates, and popes thought about religion in terms of feudal structure. Solely in God’s eyes would all Chris- tians be equal, such equality being visible in the application of the equal measure of punishment for similar sins. As Jacques Le Goff envisions it,

“[b]elief in Purgatory therefore requires the projection into the afterlife of a highly sophisticated legal and penal system.”¹²

For Le Goff, Purgatory was indeed temporary, but its purpose was not only purification but also punishment. In Capgrave’s Life of St. Augustine, Rome is also presented as a city of trial,¹³ as well as a place of hardships for Augustine. Following the falling out of the Manichean sect, Augustine travels from Carthage to Rome. Although his mother wants to accompany him, he sinfully deceives her by telling her that there is no wind, and then he sails alone. “Thus deceuyed he his modir, for þat same nyth þei pulled

10 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 3.

11 Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 15.

12 Although the idea of the “interim period” appears in a number of works, Tertullian shows it as a place for waiting and Origen speaks of purification. For Le Goff, Augustine is the true father of Purgatory, as it was he who was deeply concerned with the fate of the soul between death and the Last Judgement. Still, another important issue was the so-called “interim period.” As Le Goff, claims: “The denial of a resurrection of the righteous prior to the Last Judgement is connected with the claim that the souls of the dead will pass through a purgatorial fire in the time between death and resurrection, during which interval no other eschatological event is supposed to occur”; see Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, 52–5, 62, 83.

13 In Book 21 of The City of God, Augustine talks about punishment in hell.

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up sail & stale þe schip from hir.”¹⁴ After reaching Rome, Augustine “fell in greueous seknesse & his moder knew not þat but þouȝ he were absent sche prayed for him deuly þat our Lord schuld send her ioye of hir son, for in þis mater sche had mor sorow for him þan euyr sche had to bring him forth on-to þe world.”¹⁵ It is not overtly implied in Capgrave’s text, but one can easily detect that the ensuing sickness is punishment for the lie.

Augustine’s condition must have been so serious that Monica, his mother, prayed for him fervently and gave alms every day. Having understood his transgressions both towards God as well as towards his mother, when he returned to Rome later and heard of the Manicheans teaching “the error,”

he responded by writing two books: “There at þe prayer of christen men be mad too bokys. On hith De Moribus Manicheorum, the oþirhith De Moribus Ecclesie Catholice.”¹⁶ His works were prepared so as to atone for his sin of heresy. In Capgrave’s narrative, the city of Rome functions simultaneously as the ultimate good – the location of the Holy Apostolic Church – and the ultimate evil, the place of dissemination of heresy. Cap- grave’s figure of St. Augustine is a combination of an itinerant saint, and a proto-humanist itinerant scholar¹⁷ caught within the maze of ideas.

Such a moral labyrinth is found in Augustine’s The City of God. There, Augustine contrasts those who worship gods of their own creation and inhabit the city of man, and those who journey towards the eternal city.

“I have taken upon myself the task of defending the glorious City of God against those who prefer their gods to the Founder of the City.”¹⁸ For Augustine, the City of God was an invisible city, to be acknowledged at

14 John Capgrave, Life’s of St. Augustine and St. Gilbert of Sempringham, and a Sermon, ed.

J. J. Munro (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer. EETS, 2001 [1910]), 14–5.

15 Capgrave, Life’s of St. Augustine, 14.

16 Capgrave, Life’s of St. Augustine, 31.

17 I have discussed the idea in “Medieval Confession Manuals and Their Literary (re)Readings:

The Case of John Capgrave’s Life of St. Augustine and John Lydgate’s The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man,” in Text and Language in Medieval English Prose. A Festschrift for Tadao Kubouchi, ed. Jacek Fisiak, Akio Oizumi, and John Scaghill (Frankfurt am Main and New Jork: Peter Lang Verlag, 2005), 237–254.

18 Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London:

Penguin Books, 1984), 5. In John Capgrave’s The Life of St. Katherine of Alexandria, Alexandria is presented as a city built by sultans of Babylon. There is a lot about the city itself, its history and cur- rent rule before Katherine’s life in Capgrave’s work.

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the end of history. Although the most common identification of the city of man was Rome, Augustine refused to equate the City of God with the Church and the city of man with the destroyed Rome. Instead, he gave the two cities allegorical rather literal meaning with identifiable figures such as Cain who belonged to the city of man and Abel who belonged to the city of God.¹⁹ Nevertheless, Augustine was conscious of the city’s decadent flavour and assured his readers that immorality had destroyed Rome. Alongside the allegorical reading of the fall of the tower of Babel, the rise and fall of empires as much as the rise and fall of cities were major themes treated both literally and metaphorically in medieval philosophy, literature, and theology. Seen as the city reborn from ashes, from its pagan past, by the later Middle Ages, in the times of Margery Kempe and John Capgrave, Rome had lost its ambivalent status and had become the city of classical and Christian monuments; thus, the space of the city, which was hitherto profane, becomes once again sanctified.

Such consecration is clearly visible in Margery Kempe’s account of her trip to Rome. Margery travels extensively. Always talking about her obli- gation towards Christ, she never mentions that her trips were to be a form of penance prescribed by her confessors. Like many other female mystics, most notably Angela of Foligno, Dorothea of Montau, and Bridget of Sweden, Margery felt an overt impulse to follow God’s bidding which fulfilled a subconscious need to free herself from marriage bonds. Apart from the spiritual dimension of her pilgrimage, Margery is a seasoned tourist knowing where and how to travel.²⁰ Her stay in Rome is a long stop-over on her journey from Jerusalem to England. Landing in Venice, Margery is, characteristically, abandoned by her company. Incidentally, merchants and pilgrims, whose lives were repeatedly threatened in un-

19 Augustine grafted the history of Greece and Rome onto the Bible. He saw Jewish and classical thought converging once Old Testament was translated from Hebrew to Greek. Augustine’s work conceptualized the early Christian differentiation between Rome as the Whore of Babylon (he talks about Roman pagan gods who do not give protection to their cities, i.e. Troy or Rome, and demand sinful performances, stage spectacles) and Jerusalem the Golden, the City of God (presented in iconography as an enclosed paradise, blessed by God). Augustine’s City of God was a response to the charge that Christianity had destroyed the Roman Empire.

20 Different places had different spiritual benefits, and it was that rather than distance that turned female mystics into tourists.

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known cities and countries, were aware of the hazards awaiting them.

One has to remember that the medieval perception of space was based on ideas of belonging and exclusion: safe vs. unsafe space, safe space of the walled garden, castle, city, and unsafe space beyond the enclosure. The roads in pilgrims’ descriptions²¹ are not links between places, but a dangerous space in-between, full of real and imagined jeopardy.

Margery, however, always travels with Christ in her heart and mind.

Luckily, she sees a humpbacked beggar (his back disfigured by sickness), who turns out to be Irish. Richard of Ireland was at first reluctant to accompany her to Rome, probably having witnessed a scene in which her previous company refused to continue their journey with her, yet he was induced by the money she had offered. Finalizing the transaction, Mar- gery recalls a prophecy that a broken-backed man should lead her, and assured him that God will keep them both in safety. On the road, they meet a group of Italian pilgrims whom Margery joins and who are not put off by Margery’s boisterous praying. She is seen as a kind of foreign curiosity which they take at face value, and, surprisingly, this time she is not despised, but revered for her piety. By displaying to them her various relics, her “souvenirs de voyage,” she earns even more respect.²² In a small church which contained St. Francis of Assisi’s cell where he died, Mar- gery obtains “grace, marcy for alle hir frendys, for alle hir enemys, and

& for alle þe sowlys in Purgatory,”²³ on Lammas Day August 1, 1414.²⁴ She is further reassured that she is on the right path when she meets a wealthy lady, Margaret Florentine, who takes her and Richard under her protection. Finally, the Knights of Rhodes escort them to Rome mi- raculously.

21 For more, see Diana Webb, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West (London and New York: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2001).

22 One morning she wakes up and finds out that her ring is gone. It is the ring that Jesus com- manded her to have made with an inscription Jesus est Amor Meus, the symbol of her chastity and devotion to God. This was probably the same ring given to her by the bishop, together with the mantle. Incredible as it is, soon the ring is found under her bed.

23 Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen (Oxford: Oxford University Press. EETS, 1993), 79.

24 It is the day of the first fruit offerings in England. Until 1960 it was a feast day celebrated by the Catholic Church. The day commemorates St. Peter’s miraculous deliverance from prison.

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Arriving in Rome, upon Christ’s command, Margery, despite being a wife and a mother dresses in (virginal) white – which is not opposed by anyone – and is received into the hospital of St. Thomas of Canter- bury. The tradition of hospitals as shelters for pilgrims goes back to the establishing of monastic dormitories for guests (hospes).²⁵ Hospes were charitable institutions housing poor and not infrequently sick pilgrims.

Capgrave does not write about the hospitals of Rome, and the Hospital of St. Thomas is only mentioned once: “In euery sikirnesse I sei a uout mad at rome a ful fayre hous which is a celer at seint thomas hospital euene of þis same maner.”²⁶ At the hospital of St. Thomas of Canterbury, Margery undergoes her first purgatorial trial in Rome. She is afflicted “wyth gret wepyng boistows sobbyng, & lowed crying & was hyly belouyd with þe Maystyr of þe Hospital & with alle hys breþyr.”²⁷ Life would be too good for Margery if she was left in peace so

þer cam a preste þat was holdyn an holy man in þe hospital & also in oþer placys of Rome, þe whech was on of hir felaws & on of hir owyn cuntre-men. & not-wythstondyng hys holynes he spak so euyl of þis creatur & slawndryd so hir name in þe Hospital þat throw hys euyl language sche was put owte of þe Hospital that sche myth no lenger be schrevyn ne howselyd þer-in.²⁸

Margery welcomes martyrdom by slander. For the glory of God (and un- doubtedly her own) she endures difficulties in which she obviously re- joices, as the more oppressive are people toward her on earth, the greater the promise of heavenly pleasures. This is highlighted in her visions of Christ, who habitually communicates to her that “þe more schame, despite & reprefe þat þu sufferyst for my lofe, þe bettyr I lofeþe […].”²⁹ Christ

25 Hospitals were founded in the late Roman Empire for the treatment of the sick. Later they became houses for ailing Christian soldier-monks such as the Templars.

26 Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrims, 157.

27 Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, 80.

29 Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, 81. Margery continues reporting Christ’s words: “for I far liche a man þat louyth wel hys wife, þe mor enuye þat men han to hir þe bettyr he wyl arayn

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assures her again of his love “& al þi wepyng & þi sorwe xal turnyn in-to joy & blysse, þe whech þu xal neuyr mysse.”³⁰ Later, obeying Christ’s order (fickleness of the Lord?) she changes back into her black pilgrim’s cloth- ing, because she “suffryd sche many scornys of wyfys of Rome”³¹ and did so, as we learn, gladly. She also withstood the attacks of a priest, who was eventually defeated by her meekness and obedience. Margery refused to challenge him, although Christ tells her that “þis preste þat is thyn enmy he is but an ypocryte.”³² Margery accepts the penance prescribed by the priest of serving an impoverished old woman for six weeks.

The calamities, which Margery receives with humility, are part and par- cel of a pilgrim’s reality. What was bad or rather painful for the body was good for the soul. Another reason for travelling to holy places was linked with the strong belief in miracles, those beneficial not only to the soul but salutary to the body. For ordinary pilgrims faith healing entailed the cure of various physical ailments. Additionally, contrite and humble pilgrims were better able to obtain divine grace. Prayer and full participation in mass, however, required confession and Margery did not have a confessor in Rome. Hence, as usual, she turned to Christ for help, praying fervently in the Church of St. John Lateran’s, which according to Capgrave is “þe eldest church of þe world,”³³ “þe first þateuyr was bilid in cristendam and euene ouyr þe auter on þe wal is þe face of our sauiour whech appered on to all þe puple of rome uisible þe same day þat seynt syluester halowid þe church. And as þe elde stories sey, it was neuyr mad with mannes hand but sodeynly þus it appered.”³⁴ In this enchanted place, a German priest named Wenslawe prayed daily that he might understand her. In the end, although he spoke no English, he was granted the gift of understanding.³⁵

hir in despite of hir enmys. & ryth so, dowtyr, xal I faryn with þe.” Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, 81.

33 John Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrimes. A Description of Rome, circa A.D. 1450, by John Capgrave, an Austin Friar of King’s Lynn, ed. C. A. Mills (Oxford: Henry Frowde Oxford University Press, 1911), 146.

34 Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrimes, 73.

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In this very church Margery “wept bittyrly, sche sobbyd boistowsly &

creyd ful lowed & horybly þat þepepil was oftyn-tyme aferd & gretly astoyned, demyng sche had ben vexyd with sum euyl spiryt er a sodeyn sekenes not leuyng it was þe werk of God but raþar sym euyl spiryt.”³⁶ To those around her she is possessed by some evil spirit, rather than a mys- tic, even though her confessor believes in her. The repetitive nature of such scenes of “martyrdom by slander” highlights Margery’s, and perhaps later her scribes’, need to strengthen her claim to sainthood. After all, it is her ill reputation amongst the pilgrims in Rome that brings about her final ordeal. One day Margery meets a young priest from England, whom she treats like a son. Although her coterie of associates denounces her mak- ing confessions to a foreign priest, this is the crucial act of calumny and a stain on her holiness, something removed through a miracle when the priest’s understanding of Margery is proven at a dinner. She tells a story from the Bible in English and the confessor translates her story into Latin.

A similar marvel occurs when Margery visits St. Bridget’s chamber and speaks with Bridget’s maid. There she is saved by a translator, a name- less man.³⁷ The maid utters a number of stereotypical expressions about Bridget, which, however, to Margery are not as important as the aura of holiness of the place itself.

Such hardships as misunderstanding, false accusations, hunger, and discomfort are part of Margery’s thorny path to sainthood. And as a sign of obedience to Christ, she willingly gives away all her means of support.

One day when she lies prostrate and obviously hungry in “Seynt Mar- cellys Churche in Rome,” she wonders what to do next. The church itself is not an insignificant one. Capgrave recalls the story of Marcellus, who claimed that “þe grete temple of fals goddiss schuld be consecrat to all seyntis.”³⁸ In this church, Margery is comforted by Christ, who tells her

37 She spoke with “Seynt Brydys mayden in Rome, but sche cowd not vndirstondyn what sches eyd.” Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, 95.

38 Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrimes, 140. Saint Marcellus was a Roman by birth who became Christian. He founded the Catacombs of Priscilla on the Via Salaria, and created 25 new tituli or Christian parish churches. He was savagely flogged and expelled from the city. This is proved by his epitaph. He appears to have returned shortly afterwards, and to have been condemned to labour in the public stables, where he died. Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrimes, 141.

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of the friends he has all over the world and that he is not going to let them forsake her. Accordingly, Margery meets Margarete Florentyn again, and the lady feeds and houses her. We must assume that Margaret Florentyn was an elderly rich widow who sought consolation in religion and warded off solitude with good works and alms for people such as Margery. It is most probably Margaret Florentyn who, by taking her in, engenders for Margery the respect of the people who had previously despised her and thrown her out of the hospital. Now, they no longer claim she is possessed by the devil. She is invited back to the Hospital of St. Thomas. This event can be seen as her metaphorical return to a safe h(e)aven out of the Pur- gatory of Rome. It is then that the city loses its hostile appearance and becomes a sacred space.

At that point, Margery, spared worries of everyday life, becomes a holy tourist who visits places connected with her greatest model and co-lu- minary (rival), Saint Bridget. Characteristically, Bridget is only a figure to confirm Margery’s own sainthood, but the place itself has a touristic appeal because of the famous stone. And so: “Sche [Margery] was in þe chawmbre þat Seynt Brigypt deyed in, […] & sche knelyd also on þe ston on þe whech owr Lord aperyd to Seynt Brigtpte and telde hir what day sche xuld deyn on.”³⁹ She also visits the church in which the body of:

St. Jerom⁴⁰ lyth birijd (whech was myraculosly translatyd from Bedlem in-to þat place…), to þis creaturys gostly syght aperyng, Seynt Ierom seyd to hir sowle, “Blissed art þow dowtyr, in þe wepyng þat þu wepyst for þe peplys synnes, for many xal be sauyd þerby. And, dowtyr drede þe nowt, for it is a synguler & a special 3ift þat God hath 3ouyn þe, a welle of teerys þe whech xal neuyr man take fro þe.”⁴¹

St. Jerome was a renowned authority on the question of tears, so Margery’s revelation is not an accidental one but, one could say, is well in line with her personal politics of sainthood. In the fourteenth-century anonymous work entitled Speculum Christiani, tears are treated as one of the means

40 St. Jerome (b. c 347, Dalmatia, d. 419/420, Bethlehem, Palestine).

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of cleansing the soul from sin. The text mentions St. Chrysostom, St. Je- rome, St. Bernard amongst others, who express an opinion that tears are

“modis laxantur peccata.”⁴²

The Church of St. Maria Maggiore, where Margery receives Jerome’s visitation, was a place particular for miracles, as it was a burial place of many holy people. In the “auter of þe church restith þe body of seynt mathieþe apostil. And in a noþir auter by þe body of ierom doctor.”⁴³ The building of the church was linked to the vision of the Virgin, who did not have a church in Rome. In the church there was a portrait of the Virgin purportedly painted by St. Luke. The church was also full of relics, such as the arm of St. Thomas of Canterbury and his vestment and the arm of Luke the Evangelist. Despite St. Jerome legitimization of her tears and her behaviour, Margery, stressing her unworthiness, thanks Christ for all his graces, affirming that without him it would be impossible “to a boryn þes chamys & wonderyngys þe whech sche suffyrd pacyently & meekly […].”⁴⁴ Nonetheless, apart from purgatorial trials, in Rome, Margery is offered the supreme reward from Christ. On November 9, 1414, in the church of “þe Postelys,” she is married to Christ in the full meaning of the sacrament with the formula “I take þe, Margery, for my weddyd wife, for fayrar, for fowelar, for richer, for powerar, so þat þu be buxom & bonyr to do what byd þe do.”⁴⁵ Her vision affords her a glimpse of an almost earthly heaven as Margery sees herself as the centre of attention of the Holy Trin- ity, all the Saints and Archangels, and thus is no longer a humble traveller, an exile, but a spouse of Christ a fully-fledged visionary.

The ideal pilgrim is an individual cleansing himself or herself from sin through the hardships of travel and thus progressing towards God. What better place to be forgiven one’s transgressions than the holy apostolic seat of Rome? St. Augustine, Margery Kempe, and finally John Capgrave at some point of their lives find themselves in the Eternal City. For Au- gustine, Rome is one of many places of learning; for Margery Kempe

42 Speculum Christiani, ed. Gustaf Holmstedt (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer.

EETS, 1999), 214.

43 Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrimes, 85.

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and John Capgrave, Rome remains the sacred space of churches, in which she devotes herself to Christ and he describes for future generations of pilgrims. None of them is particularly interested in its ancient past. Even though Capgrave mentions the pagan origins of some of the sights, it is only to strengthen their transformation into Christian monuments. The city of Rome as a community of people, both good and evil, provides the context for their purgatorial trials. It stimulates Augustine’s anti-heretical writing and Margery’s conscious public dramatization of her own repent- ance. The “mixed blessing” of travelling, however, is not only connected with the perilous roads but also with the hazard of possibly relinquishing the spiritual purpose of penitential journeys.⁴⁶ Augustine alters his views and Margery marries Christ. John Capgrave, in turn, depicts the metaphorical ascent into heaven, and thus the fulfilment of the spiritual aspect of pilgrimage through the seemingly sacred content of the book. Even if today we no longer see ourselves as peregrini journeying towards the celestial city, we repeatedly travel into dark regions of the mind, and this passage can be as pleasurable as it can be dangerous and full of obstacles as the medieval penitential pilgrimage.

46 Such dangers are contained in the fourteenth-century work by William Langland, which ties in with the later Protestant scrutiny of pilgrimage with all its late medieval paraphernalia, the buy- ing of indulgences and the selling of false relics.

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