TY - JOUR
AU - Bryant, Brantley L
AB - After a shipwreck kills a king, supernatural forces bring his drowned body from the floor of the sea into the bedchamber of his grieving wife. This story, the classical myth of Ceyx and Alcyone, is retold near the beginning of medieval English writer Geoffrey Chaucer’s earliest major poem, The Book of the Duchess (c. 1368–72); in that sense, it is the first myth that Chaucer, famous re-teller of myths, ever adapts (Phillips and Haveley 29). This essay will put significant ecocritical pressure on this career-defining Ceyx and Alcyone episode, arguing that the evocation of the sea’s power in its telling provides a watery subtext to the rest of Chaucer’s seemingly terrestrial Book of the Duchess. To more fully understand this episode within late-medieval English conceptions of water’s power, this article reads the poem together with John of Trevisa’s roughly contemporary (1390s) Middle English translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s encyclopedic De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things), “the first encyclopedia in English” (Fradenburg “Among All Beasts” 21).1 Book thirteen of De proprietatibus dwells exclusively on water, and provides a Middle English articulation of medieval water-theory in miniature. Trevisa’s text makes for enlightening comparison not only because it offers a standard account of the imagination of water for the late medieval, Latin-Christian northwestern-European literary world Chaucer inhabited, but also because the cadences and choices of Trevisa’s Middle English enable close comparison with the depiction of water in The Book of the Duchess.2 Bringing Chaucer and Trevisa together shows us two late medieval English writers imagining water as paradoxically nurturing, circulating, and productive but also as terrifyingly destructive and dangerous to human space. The conjunction of The Book of the Duchess and Trevisa’s encyclopedia provides an important comparison point for scholars studying the history of the imagination of water in medieval and early modern texts, as well as a reminder of the importance of water to Chaucer’s ecopoetics. These medieval visions of water’s materiality offer, as this piece’s conclusion will propose, a useful point of comparison with recent New Materialist critical approaches. Moreover, thinking with water allows readers to see The Book of the Duchess differently. The text consists of several parts of varying topics and unequal length, having in common only their narration by the same first-person speaker. This arrangement is typical of the medieval “dream vision” genre to which Duchess belongs (Phillips and Havely 8–18; Spearing 51–55). The narrator begins by describing a mysterious and lengthy bout of insomnia, then recounts reading the story of Ceyx and Alcyone (to pass the time at night) and provides us with a narration of the myth. Taken originally from Ovid and filtered through intermediate medieval sources, the myth tells the story of the death of King Ceyx in shipwreck. Left without any knowledge of her husband, Queen Alcyone prays to Juno for a sign. In Chaucer’s version, the message comes in the form of Ceyx’s own drowned body, animated by the God of Sleep, who tells her of his fate. Although the Ovidian original then narrates Alcyone’s journey to the shore, her discovery of the body, and the couple’s transformation into halcyon sea-birds, the version in Duchess ends with Alcyone dying of grief shortly after learning the truth. After reading the myth, the narrator falls asleep and dreams of entering an idyllic landscape. Here the narrator encounters an aristocratic figure, a grieving man “clothed al in blak” (BD 457).3 The largest part of the poem, both in terms of lines and narrative attention, recounts the narrator’s extensive conversation with the Man in Black about his lost love, Lady White (BD 948). The poem and dream end abruptly after the narrator finally and definitively learns that Lady White has died, and that the Man in Black’s grief comes from that irreparable loss. As this summary suggests, the poem is, on the face of it, explicitly anthropocentric in its content and topic. Duchess dwells on courtly grief and loss, and the main actors in the poem are two human beings talking; Gillian Rudd notes its “anthropocentrically reflective atmosphere” (Greenery 74). The poem is even centered on a historical person as well, since it is written in commemoration of the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt, one of the most important nobles in England at the time and a figure with whom the historical Chaucer had many connections. The Man in Black is clearly a kind of analogue for Gaunt, and White, whose name plays on Blanche, is his lost love. In this way, the poem can clearly be characterized as an elegy, wrapped up in laments for and by humans.4 One of the most influential analyses of The Book of the Duchess in Chaucer studies, Peter Travis’s article “White,” reads the poem as centered on human language use and subjectivity, “a lingustic, literary, and psychological interrogation of the status, being, and meaning of the pronoun ‘I’” (36). Tellingly, however, Travis’s investigation almost exclusively dwells on the narrator’s interactions with the Man in Black in the later and longer part of the poem, mentioning the Ceyx-Alcyone episode only twice: once quite briefly noting the episode as part of the poem’s “complexity,” and later more substantially observing that Chaucer’s omission of details of the story from his source in Ovid can be read as a “demonstrat[ion] [of] the limits of human language to make the absent present” (3, 50). Inspired by recent materialist turns in scholarship, however, we can give more attention to Ceyx and Alcyone, noting in that odd story an interest in nonhuman matter alongside the poem’s interrogation of meaning-making explored so movingly by Travis. There is a critical tension between the poem’s elegiac centering on human emotions and the inset story of a storm that precedes it; you can’t drown someone at the beginning of a poem and then expect readers to forget about the water. The Ceyx-Alcyone episode is told, moreover, in such a way as to emphasize the elemental and inhuman power of water in contrast to human grief; additionally, resonances and reminders of water’s kinship with the human, its omnipresence, and its power recur as a subtext throughout the rest of The Book of the Duchess. The Ceyx–Alcyone episode, in its focus on a dead king and his mourning wife, has commonly been seen as a narrative or thematic foreshadow (the precise relation in debate) of the story of a grieving husband and a lost wife in the poem’s anthropocentric conversational exchange (Phillips 34–37; Cooper 76). But attending to the depiction of water in the Ceyx–Alcyone story shows that it is also a setting ajar of the poem’s anthropocentrism. The material and elemental water invoked at the poem’s beginning lingers throughout Duchess, a presaging and manifestation of the inhuman power of death that the poem attempts to understand. The Ceyx–Alcyone episode of Duchess is inherently “disanthropocentric,” its representation of the nonhuman functioning to decenter and challenge human views, its depths “making stories centered upon the human wobble.”5 Putting pressure on the Ceyx–Alcyone episode, this article argues that the Book of the Duchess is an anthropocentric elegy within a disanthropocentric frame. In order to fully explore the power of water in The Book of the Duchess, this article makes two enabling methodological moves. Firstly, to clarify the distinctive aspects and power that water has for this text, I pair discussion of Book of the Duchess with John Trevisa’s roughly contemporary Middle English encyclopedia translation. The connections between Trevisa and Chaucer, as Aranye Fradenburg observes, are significant, both moving within “the class of scribes, notaries, men of law, and civil servants” who worked in “Westminster and London” and looked to Oxford for ideas (“Among All Beasts” 18). Additionally, as the recent work of Kellie Robertson argues, a twenty-first century tendency to see poetry as separate from natural description or science is completely inaccurate for the genres of late medieval England. Robertson points out Chaucer’s intense interest in medieval materiality and science, in “get[ting] to grips with the ethical responsibility of representing the world accurately, a responsibility shared equally by medieval poets and natural philosophers alike” (114). The De proprietatibus rerum, from which Trevisa translates, is a relatively typical piece of medieval natural lore and so a good index to read against Chaucer; the text itself “filled a gap in the later Middle Ages” for knowledge about the natural world (Seymour et al. 13). Moreover, Trevisa’s encyclopedia translation gives us this discussion of water in Middle English, a distinct fourteenth-century instantiation of the text that allows for detailed verbal comparison with Chaucer’s work. Although consideration of Trevisa’s changes and manipulations to sources in the original Latin text, part of a rich history of borrowings and translations, would no doubt produce important insights, the comparisons to follow take Trevisa’s translation as a topic for analysis in its own right. This focus grants Trevisa’s translation its own significance alongside Chaucer’s poetry in a way meant to equalize canonical work and less-known “technical” text.6 The editorial team led by M. C. Seymour, who produced both the modern edition of Trevisa’s translation and a detailed account of the sources in Bartholomaeus’ Latin original, label the book on water “unbalanced and disappointing,” but a comparison with Chaucer’s poetry nevertheless shows lively currents and connections among two late fourteenth-century English writers (147). In Chaucer and Trevisa, as I detail below, we find shared emphases on a distinct conception of water, one that has some similarities with present-day assumptions but also surprising differences. The water in Chaucer and Trevisa is mobile, decentered, present within the human body and yet also powerful, dangerous, and unstable. Far from viewing water as an inert resource or as a manipulable component for human crafting or agriculture, these two medieval writers accentuate water’s strange kinship with the human and also its own vital agency.7 The analysis here builds on the study of medieval depictions of the sea in Gillian Rudd’s influential work of medieval ecocriticism, Greenery, which observes a paradoxical late medieval English view of the sea as “simultaneously a refuge and a place of trial” (135). The Book of the Duchess and Trevisa help us see that water’s ubiquity is another key component of late medieval English views; the sea is just one aspect of a water network that interpenetrates earth, air, and even the veins of the human body. Secondly, to pursue water’s presence in this text to its fullest extent, this essay reads both Chaucer and Trevisa quite closely and, at times, risks tendentiousness. As Rudd has observed, ecocritical reading of medieval texts requires us to steer away from equally valid, more prominent, but ultimately anthropocentric or allegorical readings and to instead focus on aspects of the text that might seem at first unimportant. In reading the details of water in the Ceyx–Alcyone story, this project follows Rudd in “devoting attention to elements of the works which are usually regarded as marginal, and bringing to the fore aspects which have been previously overlooked” (Greenery 11). 1. Shores, Tides, and Floods Chaucer’s retelling of the Ceyx and Alcyone story in The Book of the Duchess amplifies the power and danger of elemental water by effectively removing the shore from the spaces represented in the text. As mentioned, the text’s Ovidian original includes a reconciliation moment in which Ceyx is revived and both he and Alcyone become halcyon birds, a moment removed in Chaucer’s story in a way that renders the story distinctly hopeless. What this section will chart, however, is the way that, by omitting the metamorphosis in the legend, the Chaucerian text distinctly omits the shore to create a sharper opposition between human-built space and elemental ocean. In Middle English literature, as Rudd has observed, the shore is often identified as a boundary space for the sea, a place of safe and gradual encounter between the human and the force of water. Rudd shows that, for medieval writers, “[the sea] seems to have no end, yet in order to think of it at all [they] must provide it with edges and shores” (138). As part of her discussion, Rudd analyzes a Chaucerian example at length; in the Franklin’s Tale, Dorigen, afraid of her husband Arveragus’s death at sea, looks not at the “waters” but “either on the ships on its surface or the rocks and cliffs that mark its shore” (148). In his Middle English encyclopedia translation, Trevisa’s discussion of water shows us even more about the stakes of this emphasis on the shore. In Trevisa, the shore is a direct elemental barrier to the dangers of the sea. Trevisa describes the shore as a protective boundary to the sea, an earthly force countering water’s elemental inclination to expand unless provided with limits.8 The shore is a fundamental part of elemental balance between the forces of hot, cold, wet, and dry that traverse matter. The dryness of the coast, Trevisa writes, in an early discussion of the elements in Book Four, binds the sea: “as we seeth in the clyues and brymmes the drynes of the grauel settith a bounde to the see, and there the kinde drines of the erthe hath maistrye, he suffreth noght the fletinge reses of the see passe ferther” [as we see in the banks and shores, the dryness of the sand sets a bound for the sea, and where the natural dryness of the earth has mastery, it does not allow the flowing tides of the sea to pass further] (4.3, 137). 9 This binding is necessary since, as Trevisa writes, water would otherwise expand until it reaches equilibrium: “And water hatte aqua as it were equa ‘euen,’ for he resteth neuere of meuynge til the ouere syde thereof be euen” [And water is called aqua {Latin: water} as it were equa, ‘even,’ for it ceases never from moving until the upper side of it is even](13.1, 646). Water is “noght yholde withynne his owne meerys and boundys” [not held within its own limits and boundaries](13.1, 646). Such awareness and fear of water’s “breaking [of] boundaries” is present, as Rudd notes, in the fourteenth-century poem Cleanness’ depiction of the Biblical flood (136–137); similar moments, it can be added, occur in Chaucer’s later poem Troilus and Criseyde, which speaks of love’s force over the “governaunce” of “erthe and se” which makes the sea, “that gredy is to flowen” [which is greedy to flow], constrain its boundaries so they do not “drenchen erthe and al for evere mo” [drown earth and all forever more] (TC III.1744, 1758, 1761). Reading the artfully omitted shore of the Book of the Duchess alongside Trevisa’s physics of water makes clear that a disappearing shoreline means danger; in Chaucer’s poem, the presence of shipwreck, sea, and drowning without the consolatory or medial space of the shore would draw late medieval readers’ attention to water’s elemental power. Compared to the Ceyx and Alcyone tale’s original source in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which dwells on the shore as a transitional space, the Book of the Duchess drastically omits the shore. Moreover, the poem effectively brings the sea, via Ceyx’s emphatically material drowned body, into the built human space of Alcyone’s bedchamber. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, exceptionally well-known in medieval Europe, is widely recognized as the ultimate source for the Ceyx and Alcyone narrative in medieval literature.10 Ovid is by no means the only source for Duchess; Chaucer was certainly also familiar with the brief retelling of the story in the Book of the Fountain of Love (Livre de la fonteinne amoureuse), a poem written in 1360 by the French clerk Guillaume de Machaut, and also perhaps with the moralized medieval versions of Ovid in French and Latin that provided Christian interpretations of the Metamorphoses.11 Further productive comparison can be made with the version of the myth told by Chaucer’s contemporary English poet John Gower in his Confessio Amantis of 1390.12 The contrast of Ovid and the Ceyx–Alcyone story in Duchess, however, most clearly illustrates the Chaucerian interest in the power of the sea. Chaucer’s text leaves the shore unrepresented and immaterial. There is no mention of the shore in the main narrative when Ceyx first sets out (BD 65–75), nor is it mentioned in the context of Alcyone’s distress about her missing husband (BD 76–121). The only mention occurs when Morpheus, inhabiting Ceyx’s body, speaks to Alcyone in her dream; significantly, here an emissary of the nonhuman is the only character to mention the shore, albeit indirectly: But, goode swete herte, that ye Bury my body, for such a tyde Ye mowe yt fynde the see besyde (BD 206–208) [But, good sweet heart, may you bury my body, for at such a tide you may find it beside the sea] The words used here hint at the shore but do not construct it as a place in the text. The dialogue names the space of the shore only in relation to the sea: “the see besyde.” The only seemingly specific detail in the passage, “such a tyde,” might seem a reference to the meeting of sea and shore, but on second glance dissolves into ambiguity of time and space, matter and figure. “Tyde” in Middle English can mean “[a] specific point in time,” “the time of a tidal phenomenon,” or “the tide of the sea” itself, though its origin in an Old English word for time renders the link to the sea an ambiguous one.13 Morpheus–Ceyx’s words to Alcyone focus our attention on the proximity of the sea to land and the ambiguity of wave movement and the passage of time. Notably, this omission of the shore does not indicate a Chaucerian inability to describe littoral spaces: Chaucer’s Legend of Ariadne in his Legend of Good Women clearly places a scene on the shore, or “stronde” in Chaucer’s vocabulary (LGW 2185–2210).14 In definite contrast, the Ovidian Ceyx and Alcyone story features the shore prominently as a transitional space between the domestic world of the royal couple and the storm-prone sea. Indeed, the Ovidian text uses the shore as a place of reconciliation between human life and the inhuman power of the sea. Near the beginning of Ovid’s telling, Alcyone warns Ceyx against sea travel because she has seen the “timbers” of shipwrecks “broken on the shore” (laceras nuper tabulas in litore uidi) (XI.428).15 Once Ceyx is resolved to leave, the Ovidian text locates Alcyone on the shore as it describes the departure of Ceyx’s ship, gradually fading from her view (XI.461–470). Most importantly, Ovid’s narrative ends with a seaside reunion that Chaucer’s version so notably omits. In Ovid, Alcyone goes to the shore after Ceyx appears to her in a dream. There she sees Ceyx’s drowned body drifting coastward; leaping towards the body from a jetty, Alcyone transforms into a sea bird and then brings Ceyx back to life in a similar avian form, giving her name to the kingfisher and to the “Halcyon days” when her father, the god of winds (not mentioned in Chaucer), keeps the seas calm for his transformed daughter and son-in-law (XI.650–749). Ovid’s version of the end of the story repeatedly names the shore (Latin litus, as in “littoral”) as the place where land and sea—and Ceyx and Alcyone—encounter each other in the tale’s resolution. The distressed Alcyone, we are told, goes “to the shore” (ad litus, XI.710) and, when there, she recalls that Ceyx kissed her goodbye “on this shore” (hoc…litore, XI.713). When she leaps into the water after seeing Ceyx’s body, the Ovidian text fully imagines the transitional and protective nature of the jetty from which she jumps, noting that it was made by humans (facta manu) to block the ocean: “There was a jetty there/To break the onslaught of the rushing ocean” (adiacet undis/ facta manu moles, quae primas aequoris iras/ frangit et incursus quae praedelassat aquarum, XI.728–30, my translation). Finally, when Ceyx and Alcyone transform, we can note that they become birds capable of living on the sea and associated with calm weather. In the Machaut version of the story, even, the transformed Ceyx and Alcyone become birds who mediate between humanity and the ocean: If sailors are in trouble upon the sea, When they see these birds close by them The birds often make them certain to have Good luck or a storm. (Palmer 695-698) [Les maronniers qui en mer sont empeins, Quant d’eaus voient ces oiseles prochains, D’avoir fortune ou tempeste certeins Les font souvent] Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, on the other hand, denies the possibility of the happy ending in Ovid’s, Machaut’s, and Gower’s versions: we are told only that Alcyone dies within three days of her dream, and the narrator says it would be “to longe for to dwelle” [too long to delay] even to mention any words Alcyone might have uttered after her vision (BD 217). There is no travel to the shore, no transformation, not even any more narrative. Chaucer scholars have woven many interpretations around this drastic omission’s human consequences, but, thinking environmentally, we might notice the complete removal of the space of the shore and the resulting emphasis on the waiting ocean. Chaucer’s version not only omits the narrative element of transformation and resolution, it also erases the physical environment of the shore from the narrative. The Book of the Duchess represents only two locations: the open sea, in the shipwreck scene, and the domestic interior in which Alcyone suffers, prays, sleeps, and is visited by the drowned body. Ceyx’s appearance in the bedchamber in Chaucer’s version, in its sheer materiality, further emphasizes the sea’s power. Ceyx’s appearance effectively represents an overflowing of the sea into supposedly human space—the kind of flood that, in Trevisa, is supposed to be prevented by the boundary of the shore. In Chaucer, the “dream” that Alcyone experiences is distinctly physical. In other versions of the story, the god(s) of sleep, Morpheus or otherwise, transform themselves into only the appearance of Ceyx’s body. In Ovid, Morpheus goes “in the image of King Ceyx” (sub imagine regis) and “t[akes] on the face and form of Ceyx” (in faciem Ceycis abit sumptaque figura) (XI.627, 653). In Machaut, Morpheus “[a]ssume[s] the form of a naked Ceys” (Prist la fourme que Ceïs avoit nus). Gower’s version takes an emphatically artificial approach: the shipwreck is never directly represented, but instead several deities of sleep present the shipwreck to Alcyone through illusions in a highly performative manner that Miriamne Ara Krummel calls an “audible mimetic representation” (Confessio IV.3056–3087; Krummel 498). Chaucer’s retelling is, therefore, distinctive in its emphasis on materiality. In a “unique feature” of Duchess, Ceyx’s drowned body itself is brought up from the deep, animated, and marched into Alcyone’s bedroom (Seaman 139).16 Juno’s command accentuates the physicality of the body, telling Morpheus to find the body “[t]hat lyeth full pale and nothyng rody” [that lies very pale and in no way ruddy] in the “Great Se” [the Great Sea] (BD 140, 143). Morpheus obeys, picks up “the dreynte body,” and then goes to Alcyone’s bedchamber (BD 195). In a striking arrival of the watery alien in the familiar domestic space, Morpheus wears Ceyx eerily as he stands “ryght at hyr beddes fet” [directly at the foot of her bed](BD 199). Part of the eerieness of this scene comes from the unbounded nature of water, the ability of the “fletinge reses of the see,” as Trevisa puts it, to sweep into human space; the Chaucerian text combines the emotional force of the narrative with water’s elemental movement, showing the penetrability and vulnerability of human constructions in the face of the water that, in Trevisa’s words, “resteth neuere of meuynge.” This instance of the permeability of human barriers, I propose, lingers throughout the rest of the text, especially since other aspects of the Ceyx story emphasize the fragility of human constructions and the powerlessness of human bodies against water. 2. Shipwreck and the Sea Floor The next step in the argument will move seaward, addressing points chronologically earlier in the narrative but spatially more within water’s domain: the shipwreck itself, then the implied description of the sea floor. The imagination of water in Book of the Duchess and in Trevisa de-centers the human and stresses the material agency of the elements. This is not to say that Trevisa’s work wholly anticipates contemporary secular or materialist approaches. Trevisa’s work is undeniably theological, the text itself containing descriptions of the Godhead and angels, and even the book on water including a list of bodies of water referred to in the Bible (13.5–11, 655–659). Nevertheless, the theorization of the sea and its dangers given in Trevisa’s thirteenth book shows a notably materialist insistence. Reluctant to personify the sea or to cast it anthropocentrically as a malicious barrier to humans, Trevisa’s account provides a kind of physics of water. In his chapter on water, Trevisa extensively discusses the perils of the sea but characterizes them as logical results of its physical state. The sea, Trevisa explains, is “meuable withoute reste” [constantly moving], a motion that allows it to cleanse itself and regulate the flows of salt and fresh water (13.21, 669). The danger of the sea to humans traveling upon it, according to Trevisa, is due to this constant motion, as well as to other material factors such as the “vneuennes” [uneveness] of the sea floor, and the receptiveness of the sea to winds. “[W]ith a litil blaste of wynde in the see,” Trevisa notes, “cometh tempest and storms” [With a little blast of wind in the sea, tempests and storms occur](12.21, 670). As a result, “men that passe the see ben in peril or bycause of aer and wynde other bycause of the see” [people who cross the sea are in danger either because of air and wind or because of the sea](13.21, 671). Trevisa represents the sea as a moving system whose own dynamic interactions with other material systems make it unstable, dangerous to humans not because of hostility but because of incompatibility. In The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer’s storm description is taut, understated, and similarly casually concerned and impersonal. The Book of the Duchess shows Ceyx’s drowning to be the result of the failure of human technology in the face of a material force whose lack of malice functions as a reminder of human insignificance in the face of elemental agency. A contemporaneous chronicle example can show the distance between the material emphasis of the storm in The Book of the Duchess and the more morally or theologically inflected anthropocentric representational possibilities available in Chaucer’s time. The monastic Westminster Chronicle, a detailed account written in Latin of events in England and elsewhere from 1381 to 1394, offers us a storm episode in which the human subject is made central and divine forces regulate the sea on its behalf. Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, a patron of Westminster Abbey where the chronicle was written and thus a figure of interest for the chronicler, barely survived a sea journey in 1391, and a section of the chronicle provides an elaborate narrative. This text is close both in time and place to Chaucer, from the same approximate cultural moment as Duchess.17 In the chronicle’s account of the year 1391, we are told, Gloucester headed out with a group of ships on the way to Prussia when bad weather struck and the accompanying ships were separated from him or wrecked. His own ship was then almost lost. Narrating this event, the Westminster Chronicle at first seems to emphasize the ocean’s agency, observing that several ships accompanying Gloucester’s craft were “swallowed up by the expanse of ocean” (pelagi spaciosi absortas) (482–3). Quickly, however, the divine enters the story of Gloucester’s almost-shipwreck, as a supplement to human frailty. In “this luckless and alarming situation,” the chronicle states, Gloucester “urgently poured out to God and his saints all sorts of vows” (Dux vero in tam infausto loco terribiliter constitutus … varia Deo et ejus sanctis obnixe emisit vota) (482–3). The text pits the divine against the oceanic for the sake of the human. “The divine power,” it continues, “was exercised in [Gloucester’s] favor and he was swiftly and miraculously snatched from the sea’s greedy maw” (Confestim de illa maris ingluvie divina favente virtute fuit miraculose ereptus) (482–5). Divine power (virtus) fights a bestial sea, figured as possessing a “maw” (ingluvies), a word suggesting animality and bringing up a perceived gap between the celebrated human and its divine ally, on one hand, and the brute-like ocean on the other. The Westminster Chronicle’s willingness to employ the environment as a signification of divine grace—and favor for an aristocratic benefactor—allows us to see more of the materiality of the shipwreck in Duchess.18 The Book of the Duchess, in comparison, represents the storm in a matter-of-fact way that emphasizes water’s power. As in Trevisa, the sea is presented as a space all its own, subject to sudden change from “wynde,” and perilous to human travelers. The text evacuates all possibility of divine aid as well, clearly distinguishing itself from a theologically inflected account like that of the Westminster Chronicle.19Duchess takes advantage of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone’s origin as a pre-Christian myth, and emphasizes that fact. The narrator tells us that the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone was written in “olde tyme,” and stresses the religious alterity of antiquity by saying that the story comes from an age “[w]hile men loved the lawe of kinde” [when people loved the law of nature] (BD 53, 56).20 Its scene of shipwreck is brief and devastating. It gives the sea agency without personifying it, and it leaves no room for a divine force to interfere with water’s washing away of the human. Although the Ovidian source gives Ceyx a reason for traveling (to seek an oracular answer about his brother), Chaucer’s narrative opens with a simple and decontextualized statement of human wilfulness, Ceyx “wol wenden over see” [wished to go over the sea].21 It then narrates the appearance of a storm and the complete destruction of the ship: So it befil thereafter soone This king wol wenden over see. To tellen shortly, whan that he Was in the see thus in this wise, Swich a tempest gan to rise That brak her mast and made it falle, And clefte her ship, and dreinte hem alle, That never was founde, as it telles, Bord ne man, ne nothing elles. Right thus this king Seys loste his lif. (BD 66–75) [And so it happened soon after, [that] this king [Ceyx] wished to go over the sea. To tell it shortly, when he was in the sea in this way, such a tempest arose that broke their mast and made it fall, and cleaved their ship and drowned them all, so that there was never found, as it says, board nor person, nor anything else. In this way king Ceyx lost his life.] These four-beat octosyllabic couplets are standard for Chaucer’s earlier poetry, but their tidy effect here works especially well to create an understated depiction of a storm with no divine origin, no affect, and no possibility of divine salvation. The casual tone of “[s]uch a tempest gan to rise” presents an inherently storm-prone sea similar to that described by Trevisa, in which a “litil blaste of wynde” can cause “tempest and storms.” The passage draws attention to the ship as a technology that enables human water travel but cannot ultimately cover human vulnerability; the chain of conjunctions in “brak her mast and made it falle,/And clefte her ship, and dreinte hem alle” shows how the gradual destruction of the ship renders the humans vulnerable. The rhyme of the “falle” of the mast leads to the drowning of “alle” of the crew. In a classic study of storm scenes in fourteenth-century Middle English poetry, Nicholas Jacobs argues that alliterative writers like the Gawain-poet are especially interested in storms, while writers like Chaucer are not. Jacobs uses the passage above from The Book of the Duchess as a key example of supposed Chaucerian reticence: “The great storm in Ovid, Metamorphoses xi.474-572 is dismissed by Chaucer in three lines … ” (699). Yet the brevity or expansiveness of a storm description does not necessarily mark its power to decenter a reader’s assumptions about human agency. Ovid’s description of the storm in the original Metamorphoses is appropriately epic in length, but its extensive narration allows considerable agency to the humans on the ship, and represents the storm as an ongoing struggle between the elements and the technology of sailing. There is definite opposition between the humans and the storm in Ovid, but the narrative focus on the human attempts creates dramatic tension, leaving the possibility that a different outcome might have been reached. “Some of [the sailors],” we are told, “from their own wit and knowledge/ Had sense enough to ship the oars” [sponte tamen properant alii subducere remos] (XI.486). Additionally, the elements themselves are depicted as conflicting and in disarray, not working together as a quietly effective mechanism. Ovid puts sea and sky at war, in opposition to the Trevisan imagination of the sea in a collaborative system with the wind; for Ovid, “you would think that heavens/ were drowning in the seas, or oceans mounting/the regions of the sky” (inque fretum credas totum descendere caleum/inque plagas caeli tumefactum ascendere pontum)(XI.517–518). Ovid’s storm scene ends by relating the thoughts of the sailors and of Ceyx, describing the breaking apart of the ship, and telling of the final attempts of the shipwrecked to stay alive on wreckage. All of these elements are much closer to the alliterative Middle English poems that Jacobs analyzes, and, in fact, Jacobs argues that Latin sources like Ovid, possibly by way of medieval Latin writings, were most likely the origin of the elaborate storm descriptions he finds in medieval English alliterative poetry (706–712). In comparison with such Ovidian bluster, The Book of the Duchess’s comparative restraint becomes notable, not so much its lack of “enthusiasm,” as Jacobs would have it. A storm description like Ovid’s, though emphasizing danger, also lingers on the agency and choices of the human as a worthy opponent of the sea. Chaucer’s spare description cuts quick, like Nabokov’s “Picnic, Lightning,” to create a disanthropocentric effect. Emily Steiner has noted that the beginning of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales echoes the encyclopedic prose of Trevisa (“Compendious Genres” 86). Earlier in Chaucer’s career in Duchess, the brevity and analytically materialist nature of the storm description is similar to Trevisa’s spare accounts of the sea, both writers removing their focus from the human to calmly account for material cause and effect, as in this passage: “Of huge and grete wyndes is most drede, and namelich in case when contrarie wyndes arisen. For thanne is peril and drede for certeyne shippebreche” [Of huge and great winds is there most danger, and especially in the case when contrary winds arise. For then is period and danger of certain shipwreck.] (13.21, 671). The Book of the Duchess ends its storm with the finality of death by water; the tempest “dreinte hem alle” and “thus this king Seys lost his life.” In its emphasis on drowning and its evocation of the sea floor, Duchess plunges into an imagination of the sea as a profound reminder of human limitation.22 By focusing readers’ attention on the material nature of Ceyx’s fate, the poem uses the drowned body to explore the fragility of human integrity and identity.23 The poem repeatedly focuses attention on Ceyx’s drowned body. It encourages us to imagine Ceyx’s inert corpse, lying unmoving in the sea and available for manipulation by the nonhuman. As Seaman notes, Ceyx’s body is also “referred to only as ‘hit,’ [it] and not ‘he’” (“Disconsolate Art” 141). Juno orders Morpheus to “take up” the “body” that “lyeth,” presumably on the bottom of the sea, and to “crepe into the body” (BD 142-3, 144). The participle “dreynt,” drowned, is repeated several times: Juno orders Morpheus to tell Alcyone that Ceyx was “dreynt,” Morpheus is described as grabbing the “dreynte body,” and, when this episode closes, the narrator calls it “thys tale/ Of this dreynte Seys the kyng” [this tale of the drowned King Ceyx](BD 148, 195, 229). Drowning exposes the materiality of the human body, even of a king’s body, and its availability to the influence of other forces.24 Rudd has observed a similar emphasis in the Middle English poem Patience, a re-telling of the story of Jonah. Although Jonah does not drown, of course, Rudd finds in Jonah’s capture by the whale an ecopoetical significance similar to what this article observes in the drowning in Duchess. For Rudd, Jonah’s encounter with the whale allows the text to explore the fragility of human fantasies of power and to explore the interconnection of human and nonhuman. Patience, in Rudd’s reading, shows “the radical overthrow of Jonah’s position from being a human whose main concern is how to use the sea as a route to another area of land, to being one forced to recognise that he is part of a wider, interconnected system” (Greenery 156).25 Even more than Jonah’s body in the whale, Ceyx’s drowned body, combining the displacement of the human into the water with the grim fact of death, provides an even more disanthropocentric reminder of the sea’s power over the human. The force of the poem’s exploration of Ceyx’s drowning is such that it lingers even when Duchess moves on later to sunny, terrestrial spaces in which polite human conversation is foregrounded. The significance of drowning in The Book of the Duchess is clarified through comparison with one of Chaucer’s later and most definitive conjurations of the nonhuman force of the environment: the god Saturn in The Knight’s Tale. Represented as an old, powerful, deadly force in charge of catastrophe, Saturn embodies powers that disastrously contradict human hopes of stability. Chaucer’s Saturn identifies himself as the source of plague, rebellion, and collapse. Saturn also claims drowning as one of his spheres of influence: “Myn is the drenchyng in the see so wan” [mine is the drowning in the sea so gray] (I. 2456). As Rudd notes, Chaucer’s Saturn seems to represent “the revenge of a natural world carelessly trampled on by humans” (Greenery 64). Drowning, for Chaucer, in The Book of the Duchess and in this later passage, is clearly a moment for thinking through human vulnerability to larger environmental forces. The moment of drowning, or of the transport of the human body to the seafloor, seems to represent a moment when the illusions of human self sufficiency break down and, as Rudd says above of Jonah, the human is depicted as “part of a wider, interconnected system.” An analogy from the last part of Trevisa’s book on water also illustrates the sheer materiality and vulnerability of the human body after drowning, doing much the same work as Chaucer’s account of Ceyx. Trevisa’s book on water ends with a general account of fish and then specific descriptions of different types of fish (or, we might say, aquatic creatures, since Trevisa includes cetaceans and shellfish). This combination is, of course, simply the way the original text grouped its sources; scholars suggest that “Bartholomaeus may simply have lacked an interest in fish but felt compelled to include them in his account of waters” (Seymour et al. 148). Nevertheless, the elaborate description of fishy thriving at the end of a book on elemental water effectively reminds readers that water is a place outside the reach of the human. Trevisa observes the dependence of fish on water: “bitwene fysshe and water ben nyghenes of cosynage, for withoute water he may noght longe lyue. And he leueth noght longe with onelich brethinge withouten drawynge of water” (Between fish and water there is a closeness of relation, for without water they may not live long. And they live not long by only breathing air without drawing in water) (13.26, 675–676). Although Trevisa’s text does not expressly state that humans cannot live in water, the emphasis on the creaturely connection of fish to water reminds readers that humans are out of place under the sea. And in that place, brought by drowning, strange things happen. Citing the seventh-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, Trevisa describes the manipulation of dead human bodies by dolphins: Also he seith that delphyns knowe by smelle yif a dede man in the see ete euere of delphyns kynde. And yif the ded hath eten therof he etith him anone, and yif he dede noght he kepeth him and defendeth him fro etynge and bitynge of other fysshe, and shuueth him and bringeth him into the clyff with here owne wrotz. Aristotle seith the same and Plius also. (13.26, 681–82). [Also he [Isidore of Seville] says that dolphins know by smell if a dead man in the sea ever ate dolphin. And if the dead [man] has eaten it, they eat him right then, and if he did not they guard him and defend him from being eaten and bitten by other fish, and they push him and bring him to shore with their own snouts. Aristotle says the same and Pliny also.] Trevisa depicts a drowned body subject to the judgment of nonhuman forces. The dietary choices of the human being live on after death—chemically, we might say—and lead to consumption or respectful return to the land by nonhuman animals. The moment, both creepy and tender, of the dolphins ready to devour the body or to nudge it along with their snouts imagines, as Duchess’ Ceyx story does, the drowned human body radically open to movement by the nonhuman. In addition to the disanthropocentric effect achieved by Duchess’s focus on Ceyx’s inert body, the text also gains force through its suggestive, though indirect, evocation of the seafloor, the place furthest from the human-defined space of the bedchamber. Duchess does not specify which part of the sea Ceyx sinks into, but it does specify the depth: we know that he is lying (“lyeth”) under the sea, “ful pale and nothyng rody” [very pale and in no way ruddy]. Juno tells Morpheus that he must go “into the Grete Se” [into the Great Sea (the Mediterranean)] to find Ceyx’s body (BD 140). The poem does not name or describe the sea floor, leaving it as vague as the shore, but that inescapable image of Ceyx’s body “pale and nothyng rody” does indirectly conjure up the bottom of the sea. In specifying a body, the text invites us to fill in its location, to bring our minds down into the depths. Another late-medieval text clarifies the alien-ness of the space we are thus asked to imagine. The late medieval mystic Julian of Norwich’s Shewings tellingly chooses the power of God to protect humans on the sea floor as an example of the ineffable might of the divine. The passage depicts the sea floor as a place of absolute desolation, whose similarity to the terrestrial world only accentuates its strangeness: One tyme mine understondyng was led downe into the see ground, and there I saw hill and dalis grene, semand, as it were, mosse begrowne, with wrekke and with gravel. Than I understode thus, that if a man or a woman were under the broade watyr, if he might have sight of God, so as God is with a man contin- ually, he should be save in body and soule and take no harme; and, overpassing, he should have mor solace and comfort than al this world can telle. (I.361–366) [One time my mind’s eye was led down to the bottom of the sea, and there I saw green hills and dales, seeming, as it were, overgrown with moss, with wrecks and with sand. Then I understood thus, that if a man or woman were under the wide waters, if he might have sight of God, as God is with man continually, he should be safe in body and soul and take no harm; and, more than that, he should have more solace and comfort than all this world can tell.]26 The sheer alien nature of the world “under the broade watyr” is asserted by Julian’s claim that even in the wasteland of the sea floor, God’s love can give “solace and comfort” to humans. In similarly, though indirectly, evoking the sea floor, The Book of the Duchess brings up the very limits of human understanding and conjures up a vision desolate for humans—though of course quite comfortable for the fish. Steve Mentz, examining the Early Modern period, has argued that the sea floor in Shakespeare represents “the impossible fantasy of knowing the unknowable, reaching the bottom of the bottomless place,” but there is a clear difference in Early Modern and Late Medieval undersea imaginations: the vision suggested by Duchess is not so much the fantasy of reaching the sea’s ground as the reverent and powerless awe at its unclosable distance (Shakespeare’s Ocean xiii). What can be found by paying careful critical attention to the death of Ceyx, through consideration of details and contemporary contexts, is a depiction of the sea as a radical challenge to the human, one that opens up questions about the reliability of human choice and the integrity of the body and the self. The sea of the Ceyx–Alcyone episode opens up such a great challenge to the anthropocentric that the rest of the text must be read differently. Additionally, a series of continuing references to water’s appearance in the text, a water subtext, points the reader back to the Ceyx–Alcyone episode at several key moments. 3. The Water Subtext in the “Man in Black” Sequence The central dream in Book of the Duchess begins with a passage that establishes a sharp contrast between the storm and sea in the Ceyx episode and the seemingly protected space of the dream. This contrast will soon break down, but it provides the reader with a moment of anthropocentric security in which world and weather perfectly cater to human comfort. The narrator awakes in a chamber in which the best parts of interior built space (bed, décor) are combined with a pleasant exterior setting of sun, singing birds, and good weather (BD 291–343). Rather than the intrusion of a threatening watery body, outside and inside are maintained as “throgh the glas the sonne shon” [the sun shone through the glass] (BD 336). In contrast to the cold sea and the vulnerable chamber of the prefatory myth, Duchess’ main narrative depicts a perfect day: …the welken was so fair – Blew, bryght, clere was the ayr, And ful attempre for sothe hyt was; For nother to cold nor hoot yt nas, Ne in al the welken was a clowde. (BD 339–343) [The sky was so fair—blue, bright, clear was the air, and it was completely pleasant, in truth, because it was neither too cold nor too hot, and in all the sky there was not a cloud.] The “ayr” is “bryght” and “clere,” as if the opposite of the sea floor that renders bodies “nothyng rody.” The weather is “attempre,” comfortably between the extremes of hot and cold; a cloudless sky gives no hint of rain. If Ceyx is plunged into the most perilous element, in this moment the elements work together to please. Water will return, however, in several moments that amount to a water subtext in the main dream. The above sections of this essay have argued that the particulars of the presentation of water’s power in the Ceyx–Alcyone episode provide a lasting disanthropocentric effect for the rest of the poem. Not only does the power of the Ceyx story itself linger, but, at key points in the main dream sequence of the poem, the text reminds readers of water’s ubiquity. These moments show that even in seemingly terrestrial and courtly spaces, water is always present, just as humanity is never not subject to the reality of death confronted throughout Duchess. Travis identifies moments of confusion about names in the poem, “nominal cruces,” that, when analyzed, reveal a much larger “metalinguistic program” in the poem that interrogates the very stability of signs (4, 19). Similarly, we will observe moments where water subtly enters the main body of the dream, calling to the Ceyx–Alcyone episode again and providing an environmental commentary on the fallibility and vulnerability of human space-making. Such analysis continues Rudd’s method of carefully viewing environmental detail in order to “refocus our views accordingly,” and leads us to see that water is more present in The Book of the Duchess than we at first might think (Greenery 11). The two moments that most powerfully remind us of water’s presence are the ascription of the growth of the idyllic forest to the power of dew and the description of the Man in Black fainting as a material moment of fluid dynamics of hot and cold, current and flow. These two moments also can be richly contextualized by turning again to Trevisa’s theorization of water. They highlight two distinctive aspects of late medieval thinking on water: tendencies we could label “rhizomatic ubiquity” and “isomorphism.” First, in Trevisa’s conception of water, in a way analogous to the surprising appearance of water in Duchess, water is a completely mobile and ubiquitous element. 27 Rudd’s ecocritical study of water in Middle English literature focuses on “Sea and Coast,” but in Trevisa we see no strict separation between the larger bodies of water in sea and ocean (technically distinguished as “sea” for Mediterranean and “ocean” for the waters surrounding the outside of the three known medieval contents (13.21, 672; 13.22, 673–674)) and the water found throughout the layers of the earth and air. Trevisa’s discussion resembles the “water cycle” familiar to (at least US) citizens from elementary education, in which water from the sea moves to cloud to rain to soil and down. Yet Trevisa’s water system does not stop at “cycle.” It is multi-directional and non-hierarchical in a way that evokes the pattern of the “rhizome” from the theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, since water permeates earth and sky and sea in multiple, criss-crossing patterns, “composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather dimensions in motion” (21). Trevisa writes that there are “many diuerse waters” [many diverse waters] that are carried through the air and earth and that reside in the ocean (13.1, 647). Water, for example, moves through the sky in clouds made of rain and dew (13.24, 674–5). It also runs underground in tunnels or “secret ways” from the sea to the sources of wells and rivers: “For euery ryuver cometh originalich oute of the see by priue waies, and spryngeth oute in welle heuedes, and passeth efte into the see” [For every river comes originally out of the sea by secret ways, and springs out in well heads, and passes again into the sea] (13.3, 651). And, as these passages already suggest, Trevisa names the sea as the source “modir” [mother], of all water (13.21, 647). “[T]he see,” he writes, “is heed and herborewe of ryuers and welle of rayne” [The sea is head and shelter of rivers and well of rain](13.21, 666). Trevisa’s text renders the division between land and sea extremely unstable—water comes from the sea in “priue waies” through the land, emerging into rivers that return to the sea. In the description of the earth in another book, Trevisa describes the “erthe” as “by priue waies ythurled with moysture of the see” [by secret ways laced with moisture of the sea] (14.2, 692). Even the distinction between salt and fresh water that might be used to differentiate areas of the water system does not apply; in Trevisa’s account, water takes on or puts off salinity as it moves from one space to another. Trevisa states that when water passes through the earth from the sea to rivers, for example, its salinity disappears (13.21, 669); when water is in the ocean, however, the heat of the sun renders it salty (13.21, 666). Instability, movement, and interconnection can be found everywhere in Trevisa’s water-writing. Even the sea itself endlessly churns, cleansing itself and producing storms; as we have seen, Trevisa calls it “meuable withoute reste” (13.21, 669). Water, for Trevisa, circulates around, through, over the planet’s sphere in a complicated and multidirectional network, and its source and goal is always changing depths that are themselves constantly mutable.28 The sea in which Ceyx perishes can never, strictly speaking, be escaped, since it is part of this system. The Book of the Duchess acknowledges this water network at a key moment. After the pleasant description of weather at the beginning of the central dream, the narrator leaves the chamber, follows an aristocratic hunt, and then is led into a forest. When then narrator has passed into the most exquisitely described, and seemingly land-locked, part of the forest, and directly before the narrator encounters the Man in Black, the text presents us with a reminder of water’s presence. While describing a particularly luxuriant part of the forest, the text identifies the source and cause of the local plants’ growth: Hyt had forgete the povertee That wynter, thorgh hys colde morwes Had mad hyt suffre, and his sorwes; All was forgeten, and that was sene, For al the woode was waxen grene; Swetnesse of dew had mad hyt waxe. (BD 410-415) [It {that part of the wood} had forgotten the poverty that winter, through its cold mornings, had made it suffer, and {forgotten} its sorrows. All was forgotten, and that was {clearly} seen because all the wood had become green; {the} sweetness of dew had made it grow.] In this description, which so crucially establishes the natural beauty of the location in which the narrator will encounter the Man in Black, the water-subtext surprises us in the mention of dew. In Trevisa, dew is part of the water system, one of the array of shapes that water can take in its transit: “A drope is a wel litel partie of the see other of water other of rayne departede by some violence from the hole} [a drop is a very small part of the sea or of water or of rain separated by some force from the whole” (13.24, 674). Trevisa’s eleventh book on air and weather also shows the connection between dew and water: “[f]or dewe is litle rayne and rayne is moche dewe” [for dew is a small amount of rain, and rain is a large amount of dew](11.6, 582). The note of dew’s generative power in this passage, dew making the plants to “waxen grene,” provides a distinct contrast with water’s deadly power over the human in the Ceyx story, showing a consideration of the paradoxical range of effects that water can have. Dew, in fact, is endowed with particular virtue in Trevisa’s writing. Dew is a form of water especially associated with nurturing and generative effects: For he moisteth the erthe that he falleth vpon and maketh it plenteuouse and fruytful, and fedith and norissheth rotes and seedes, and maketh growe and quiketh and saueth grenesse in treen, herbes, and gras, and fedeth and norisseth fysshe in the see, and maketh oystres fatte, and bredeth therynne perles and preciouse stones, as Ysider seith, and nameliche the drope of dewe. (13.24, 675) [For it {a water-drop} moistens the earth that it falls upon and makes it plenteous and fruitful, and feeds and nourishes roots and seeds, and makes grow, and enlivens, and maintains greenness in trees, plants, and grass, and feeds and nourishes fish in the sea, and makes oysters fat, and breeds within them pearls and precious stones, as Isidore says, and namely the dew drop] Both Trevisa’s and Chaucer’s texts see dew as water in its generative form; both the above passage and the description from Book of the Duchess connect the moisture of dew with vibrant green life.29 Trevisa’s passage also highlights the interconnections of sea and land by mentioning both terrestrial plants and oysters as recipients of dew’s nourishment.30 The dew’s “swetnesse,” in Chaucer, reminds us of water’s changing but united forms, since “swete” in Middle English is a word used to designate fresh water; it is used with this meaning in Trevisa’s discussion of river water (13.3, 651). The element whose dangerous force caused Ceyx’s death now nourishes the trees. The next most notable moment of water subtext occurs in relation to the Man in Black himself, the poem’s protagonist and patient, in the description of his body’s action when he faints from grief. In the description of the Man in Black’s body, we see a tendency in Chaucer and Trevisa to note the similarities between the circulation of water in the earth and the functioning of the blood in the human body, an isomorphism, or recognition of similar shapes, between the human and the elemental and hydro-geologic. Trevisa makes this connection explicitly in an early section of De Proprietatibus that discusses subterreanean streams, comparing water channels to veins: “And so as blood doth rennynge in the veynes of the body, so doth the veynes of watir, for it moistith the dryenes of the erthe, and disposith it and souplith to bere fruyt” [And so as blood does {by} running in the veins of the body, so do the veins of water {in the earth}, for {water} moistens the dryness of the earth, and disposes it and softens {it} to bear fruit](4.4, 142). The human body and the earth, in Trevisa, both require the presence of water to balance out the other elements; just as we have seen above that the earth, for Trevisa, is full of passages running with water, so the human body has its own water-network. The narrator, in the first moments of his encounter with the Man in Black, eavesdrops upon the somberly attired knight as he recites a sorrowful poem. After the recitation, the Man in Black’s heart goes faint and causes his blood to move from his extremities to his chest. Importantly, this is the turning point in the narrative—the Man in Black faints, and then the narrator is moved to approach him, beginning the interaction that will become the poem’s centerpiece. And this crucial passage imagines the human body as a material site of watery interactions. As in Trevisa, the interchanging forces of heat, cold, dryness, and moisture govern the functioning of the human body as much as they do the movements of water: Hys sorwful hert gan faste faynte And his spirites wexen dede; The blood was fled for pure drede Doun to hys herte, to make hym warm – For wel hyt feled the herte had harm… (BD 488–492) [His {the Man in Black’s} sorrowful heart began quickly to grow faint, and his spirits became dead. The blood had fled for pure fear down to his heart, to make it {him?} warm, for it knew well the heart had {sustained} harm…] This passage, as Fradenburg observes, divides the Man in Black into parts: “his very body is groupified” (Sacrifice Your Love 100). Significantly for the water subtext of this poem, these parts are connected by what we might call fluid dynamics. The Man in Black’s blood moves to warm his heart. Similarly, Trevisa’s account of water observes its shifts and movements according to changes in temperature. The Man in Black’s blood, heart, and body function like a spring in winter, as described by Trevisa: “yn wynter heete fleeth and voideth the maistrie of his contrarie and draweth inwarde to the ynner partie of a wel, and by presence of that heete and continuel betynge the mouthe of the wel is hote” [in winter heat flees and avoids the power of his contrary {cold} and draws inward to the inner part of a spring, and by presence of that heat and {also the} continual lapping the mouth of the spring is hot] (13.1, 649). The fluid dynamics of the Man in Black’s heart and the temperature of a winter spring are of course different in detail, but the description of heart and blood here registers the kinship of human bodily matter with water. Verbal echoes in Trevisa even suggest that the heart could be analogized with the sea. We have seen that for Trevisa the sea is “heed and herborewe of ryuers and welle of rayne” (13.21, 666). If the sea is the churning source and destination for water as it crosses many paths, the heart is described similarly elsewhere in Trevisa as the source and destination of blood: “the firste heed and welle of blood” (the main headspring and source of blood)(4.7, 152). Duchess’s description of the materiality of the Man in Black’s heart, an example of the isomorphic tendencies of medieval water writing, reminds us of water’s elemental power and presence directly at the beginning of the anthropocentric dialogue in the main part of the text. Even the wording used to describe the Man in Black’s physical appearance, as observed by the narrator, brings us back to Ceyx; the man in Black turns “pale” for “ther noo blood ys sene/In no maner lym of hys” [no blood is seen there in any of his limbs], just as Ceyx’s inanimate body was described as “full pale and nothynge rody” (BD 498–499, 143). The subsequent dialogue of the dreamer and the Man in Black dwells mainly on human customs, emotions, and reactions and seems to leave the elements and environment behind. Nevertheless, the text’s initial description of the “herte” in a distinctly material, suggestively watery way decenters this discussion, extending the effect of the initial Ceyx episode. “Herte” is an obsessively repeated word in the Man in Black’s long discussion of his love for Lady White. Including only the times the word is used by the Man in Black, excluding all possibly ambiguous indirect references and adjectival forms, “herte” appears eighteen times in his reminiscenes and laments.31 And, just as drowning at the beginning of the poem makes its anthropocentrism veer off course, so the initial representation of the heart’s watery substance lends an implicit instability to the symbolic and courtly refigurations of the word heart in the later dialogue. Throughout the Man in Black’s story, “herte” is meant to take on a variety of figurative meanings relating to courtly fashion and the elaboration of emotion, for example, amorous dedication (BD 772) or emotional effort (BD 1224). Having introduced the Man in Black with a detailed account of the functioning of a material, anatomical heart, washed over by the ebb and flow of blood, though, the poem asks readers to juxtapose these later immaterial courtly “hertes” with an enduring image of the material connection of humans and water, the blood-filled heart; this activates the range of meanings of “herte” in Middle English, on the one side “the human heart considered medically or scientifically,” and, on the other, the figurative meanings of “the center of psychic and sensitive functions” or “the center or seat of human emotion” (MED s.v. “herte, n.”). Even when most anthropocentric, the text remains aware of water’s power. 4. Conclusion: Medieval Water and New Materialism The end of the poem briefly moves away from water, indeed, away from the material or environmental altogether (though the reference to a “Drye See” may invite analysis) (BD 1028). Nevertheless, we are not allowed to forget Ceyx, a reminder that the initial drowning and the water subtext are crucial to the poem’s meaning. The narrator awakes at the end of Duchess to find himself still clutching the book in which he read the Ceyx–Alcyone story: Therwyth I awook myselve And fond me lyinge in my bed; And the book that I hadde red, Of Alcione and Seys the kyng, And of the goddes of slepyng, I fond it in myn hond ful even. (BD 1324–1329) [And with that I myself awoke/and found myself lying in my bed;/ And the book that I had read/ of Alcyone and King Ceyx/ and of the gods of sleep/ I found it right there in my hand.] In a moment similar to the entrance of Ceyx’s body into Alcyone’s bedroom, the intrusion of the watery element into human space, the narrator awakes from his dream to find the book, a material reminder of its own, in his bed. The Ceyx story also lingers in the later Chaucerian oeuvre itself. Self-referentially listing his own productions in The Canterbury Tales, the last—and unfinished—work of his career, Chaucer is still thinking of this story when he notes of himself in the third person that “[i]n youthe he made of Ceys and Alcione” [in youth, he {Chaucer} composed poetry about Ceyx and Alcyone] (Canterbury Tales II.57). The powerful articulation of a distinct materiality of water in two late medieval Middle English texts, Chaucer’s Duchess and Trevisa’s De proprietatibus rerum translation, opens significant possibilities for future investigation. The ecocritical analysis of Chaucer has clearly reached a moment where its initial methods, goals, and viability have been established by the ground-breaking work of scholars, and now a thriving and multi-directional analysis is underway, one that includes explorations of water, sea, and ocean.32 This examination of water, in turn, connects with a broad, multi-period examination of water’s representation, force, and use in a variety of time periods, practiced by many researchers and going by many names; Mentz, for example, labels it a “Blue Cultural Studies” (Mentz “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies” 997).33 Moreover, the agency, power, and materiality of elemental water in The Book of the Duchess and Trevisa suggests connections with currents in New Materialist scholarship.34 These late-medieval texts have more in common with recent theoretical emphases than might be expected, and show the extreme limitations of earlier views that might see all the productions of medieval Europe as theologically focused on human domination.35 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s book Stone, an exploration of the materiality of stone and its connection to human story, explores the potential for connecting old medieval texts with new materialism. Cohen shows that medieval writers’ representations of stone “pose [a challenge] to those who would disenchant the world” with “dreary and destructive modes of reducing matter to raw material, diminishing objects to uses” (Cohen 9). Approaching medieval water might most directly engage with Stacy Alaimo’s recent work on water. Alaimo stresses the ways that human agency and human exclusivity are complicated and challenged when considering the issues of twenty-first century ocean ecology. Writing about the present, Stacy Alaimo coins the term “trans-corporeality” to identify the dizzyingly complex chains of environmental cause and effect crossing bodies human and nonhuman in the twenty-first century, relations that render “the human … always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (Bodily Natures 2). Alaimo argues that the concept of trans-corporeality can help us understand the entanglement of human actions and the fate of the oceans. She urgently proposes “[a] transcorporeal, oceanic ecocriticism [that] floats in a productive state of suspension, between terrestrial human habitats and distant benthic and pelagic realms,” a way of thinking that “suggest[s] that there is no solid ground, no foundation, no safe place to stand” (“States of Suspension” 490). My argument here suggests a similar imagination in Chaucer and Trevisa’s representations of water, a late medieval English vision of a world where water permeates solid ground and brings the world of human artifice into a “state of suspension.” The liveliness, ubiquity, isomorphism, and paradoxically both fatal and nurturing nature of water as imagined in The Book of the Duchess and Trevisa is a powerful corrective, across time, to those who would see the sea as only a trade route or water as no more than a shade on a drought map showing how many days to set the sprinkler. Chaucer and Trevisa offer powerful imaginative and poetic correctives to those who would see water as quantifiable environmental capital and not as wonder: a tide inside our blood, a network connecting creature and world in currents of obligation and kinship. Study of water in Chaucer, already quite visible in recent publications, can yield such new perspectives, making good on Carolyn Dinshaw’s claim that ecological study of medieval texts can reveal “artifacts that have enduring power to prompt our thinking in different directions and move us effectively” (355). Even more Chaucerian texts must be brought into the conversation, including the most famously canonical and poetically innovative lines of the Chaucerian corpus, the invocation of powerful elemental rain at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales. At the beginning of Chaucer’s career, though, we already see that rain anticipated in the force of water in The Book of the Duchess. Attending to water in this earliest text helps us see a further dimension to a poetic project often interpreted as anthropocentrically and terrestrially elegiac. The poem’s lament for Blanche’s death remains, as it should; it is not obscured by Ceyx’s drowning or the water subtext, but expanded. If Blanche’s death is a reminder of mortality, of the limits of language, as Travis powerfully argues, then the poem’s deep interest in water’s presence and power also leads readers to question the limits of the human and to consider the kinship of mortality and matter, to read The Book of the Duchess as an ecomaterial elegy. Thank you to Paul Megna, who created the panel that started this project, and to co-panelists Kristi Janelle Castleberry and Emily Houlik-Ritchey. For support, I thank the #medievaltwitter community. I’m grateful to Jake McGinnis, ISLE Managing Editor, and to the ISLE reviewers for their insights. For kind readings, shared references, and other invaluable contributions, I thank Karen Bridges, David Coley, Ashby Kinch, Megan Leitch, Steve Mentz, Emily Steiner, and Paul Strohm. For everything, I thank Sakina Bryant. Footnotes 1 On the dating of the work, see Keiser 3599; Fowler 85, 206–212. For a recent essay on Trevisa's career and importance, see Steiner, “Berkeley Castle” 227–239. 2 The distinctive quality of Trevisa's Middle English is noted in Fradenburg, “Among All Beasts” 23–24, Lawler 267–288, and Steiner, “Compendious Genres” 73–92. Fradenburg’s discussion in “Among All Beasts” directly inspired the comparison of Chaucer and Trevisa in this project. 3 All Chaucer citations are from Benson et al. ed. The Riverside Chaucer, with line numbers in parentheses. Notes in the Phillips and Havely edition of Book of the Duchess were also used. Lines from The Book of the Duchess are labeled BD. All Chaucer translations my own, incorporating verbatim wording from glosses in the editions and definitions in the online Middle English Dictionary. 4 On Duchess as elegy, see Phillips and Havely 29–30 and Travis 41–43. 5 The term is coined by Cohen, 25. See also Cohen 9, 34, 65. 6 See note 2, above. Steiner makes a claim for the “lyrical encyclopedism” of Trevisa’s translation and compares it to Chaucer’s General Prologue in “Compendious Genres” 83–86. 7 The use of “vital” here refers to Jane Bennett’s “vital materialism,” 17–19. For a more politically-oriented analysis of medieval English views of water, see Sobecki. 8 Also see Rudd’s discussion of the boundaries of the sea and the fear of flood in the works of the Pearl-poet, Greenery 148–151. 9 Trevisa citations refer to Seymour et al.’s edition of Trevisa’s translation. Parenthetical references give book number, chapter number, and page number in Seymour. Archaic letters thorn and yogh, printed in Seymour, are silently modernized here. Translations are my own. 10 On the poem’s sources, see Phillips and Havely 34–36, 38–43, and the discussion in Windeatt ix–xvii. On Ovid, see Dimmick 264–87. 11 On Machaut, see Palmer’s translation of The Fountain of Love xi–xxii; xx on the poem’s date. 12 The dating of the poem is discussed in Gower, Confessio Amantis, Vol. 1, 44. The Ceyx and Alcyone episode occurs in Book 4, printed in Confessio Amantis, Vol. 2. 13 Middle English Dictionary s.v. tide (n.). Oxford English Dictionary s. v. tide (n.). Rudd observes a similar play on the word tide in the poem Patience, Greenery 152. 14 Additionally, in The Canterbury Tales, the Man of Law’s Tale features several scenes that take place on the shore (II.505–518, 862–868). The shore in The Man of Law’s Tale is developed fully enough to be available for interpretation as a place of cultural contact in Hsy 215–224. See also the discussion of the shoreline rocks of The Franklin’s Tale in Rudd, Greenery 139–148. For a similarly well-defined shore space in another medieval text, note Sobecki’s discussion of extensive depiction of the shore in the early romance Roman d’Horn, 100–109. 15 Latin text of Tarrant. 16 For readings of this scene as eerie and not consoling, and for the importance of Ceyx’s bodily appearance, see Evans and Seaman; also Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love 94. 17 Hector and Harvey observe that the chronicle was likely written from the late 1380s to 1397, recording events several years after they occurred, xxx. 18 On Gloucester’s connections with the abbey see Hector and Harvey xxii, lvi. 19 Conlan’s 1999 Ph.D. dissertation theorizes that a “nautical piety” is present in many works of the English Middle Ages and Renaissance. Conlan notes that Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess questions this notion of nautical piety. Conlan’s argument is tied to a larger and very specific point about Chaucer and Ricardian politics, but his distinction generally supports the claim that The Book of the Duchess presents a materialist storm. 20 Krummel similarly argues that Chaucer’s contemporary, the poet John Gower, who also wrote a Middle English retelling of the Ceyx and Alcyone story, “does not include any religious apparatus” in his retelling and prioritizes “secular” performance over “religious vision,” 497–528, 523, 524. 21 As Foster observes, Chaucer “omits” both the “details … of Ceyx’s motivations to travel” and also the “public world of politics” mentioned in Ovid’s story, 62. 22 On the sea floor as “unreachable” in Shakespeare, see Mentz, Shakespeare’s Ocean xiii. 23 Conlan’s thesis suggests a variety of significant cultural roles for drowning in medieval England. Conlan observes that events at sea had an “apocalyptic” aspect and that there was a “general spiritual anxiety in the fourteenth century about death at sea,” 65, 77. 24 Roman’s reading of Ceyx’s body, through the lens of animal studies, as an “unnatural animal” that presents Alcyone with “unthinkable combinations,” aligns with the disanthropocentic interpretation proposed here, 147. 25 On Patience, also see Palti. 26 Conlan examines this passage in “Marvelous Passages,” 74–77. 27 For an account of a historically specific Early Modern conception of water’s flow, distinct from the medieval one here, see Duckert’s recent exploration of the materiality of rain in the work of seventeenth-century travel writer François Bernier, “When It Rains.” 28 Sobecki also notes the “almost infinite, circular motion” of water in the encyclopedia of Isidore of Seville and in a passage (Confessio Amantis 7.591-600) of poetry from Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower, 88. Samuel McMillan has observed a “poetics of the river” in Gower’s work in the paper “Through the Unruly Flood: Rivers and Authorship in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” presented at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, Spring 2017. 29 See also the discussion of dew in book eleven of De proprietatibus rerum (11.6, 583). 30 Rudd notes this mention of dew as part of her argument that this passage “is … on the edge of conceding a degree of sentience to the trees,” Greenery 72. 31 Spelled “herte” or “hert,” lines 575, 594, 768, 776, 841, 842, 884, 896, 1092, 1108, 1153, 1172, 1175, 1193, 1211, 1222, 1224, 1275. I have consulted the on-line Chaucer concordance on Gerard NeCastros’ website and checked it against the Riverside Chaucer. 32 Important field-defining work from 1996 to today includes Kiser, Douglass, Stanbury, Rudd’s Greenery, and Palti. Critical animal studies is also flourishing in medieval scholarship, see Holsinger. 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TI - The Power of Water in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isy091
DA - 2019-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-power-of-water-in-geoffrey-chaucer-s-the-book-of-the-duchess-l30RzkFYl7
SP - 1006
EP - 1037
VL - 26
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -