Vile Bodies in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pelèrinage de la vie humaine

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Notes

1 Guillaume de Deguileville, The Pilgrimage of Human Life (Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine), trans. Eugene Clasby (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1991), 123: 9059–104. Page and line references are to Clasby’s modern English translation. He based his translation on J.J. Stürzinger’s edition for the Roxburgh Club (London, 1895), which in turn was based on the fourteenth-century Bibliothèque national de France’s MS français 1818. Clasby’s line numbers refer to the Stürzinger edition. The Middle English translation has been edited by Avril Henry: The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1985), 2 vols. The passage describing Avarice is Henry, vol. 1, 116–17.

2 This manuscript was made around 1430, possibly in Lincolnshire. The original owner is unknown, but in the sixteenth century it belonged to Sir John Roucliffe, whose signature appears on folios 1r. and 215v. In the nineteenth century, the manuscript was in the possession of the Clifford family of Chudleigh, whose bookplate appeared on the front paste-down of the old seventeenth-century binding. State Library Victoria (then the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria) purchased the manuscript in 1936 through the Felton Bequest.  The manuscript comprises 217 folios composed of middling-quality parchment, written in an English cursive book hand by two scribes. In addition to the Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode it includes the Middle English translation of the second part of Deguileville’s trilogy, Pilgrimage of the Sowle. It is liberally illustrated with seventy-one unframed pen-and-ink drawings (thirty-seven for the Lyfe, thirty-four for the Sowle) by a single artist, in various stages of completion, some coloured with green, yellow, and red wash. This is the only known work by this artist; the closest comparison is the similarly unframed pen-and-ink drawings in the Carthusian miscellany, London, British Library, Add. MS 37049. The manuscript is one of six extant of the Middle English prose translation of the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, of which only two copies are illustrated, the other being Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 740. Literature on the State Library Victoria manuscript includes: Avril Henry, ‘The Illuminations in Two Illustrated Middle English Manuscripts of the Prose “Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode”’, Scriptorium 37 (1983): 264–73; Margaret M. Manion and Vera F. Vines, Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts in Australian Collections (Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 110–12; Hilary Maddocks, ‘“Me thowte as I slepte that I was a pilgrime”: Text and Illustration in Deguileville’s “Pilgrimages” in the State Library of Victoria’, La Trobe Library Journal 51 & 52 (1993): 60–69; Hilary Maddocks, ‘Seeing is Believing: Reading the Deadly Sins in Deguileville’s “Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode” in the State Library of Victoria’ in Imagination, Books and Community in Medieval Europe, ed. Gregory Kratzmann (Melbourne: State Library of Victoria and Macmillan Publishers, 2009), 204–11; and Hugh Hudson, ‘Lifelong Learning: the “Pilgrimage” Manuscript in the State Library of Victoria’, Scriptorium 66 (2012): 382–89.

3 The digitised State Library Victoria manuscript can be viewed at https://viewer.slv.vic.gov.au/?entity=IE4418824&file=FL9665220&mode=browse.

4 See Michael Camille, ‘The Illustrated Manuscripts of Guillaume de Deguileville’s “Pèlerinages” 1330–1426’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1984), 5.

5 Deguileville’s biographical details are almost entirely contained within his poetical works. For his life and work see E. Faral, ‘Guillaume de Digulleville, Moine de Chaalis’, Histoire Littéraire de France 39 (1952): 1–132, and Marco Nievergelt and Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath, eds, The Pèlerinage Allegories of Guillaume de Deguileville: Tradition, Authority and Influence (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2013), 1–5.

6 Michael Camille noted sixty-six manuscripts of the first version of the French Vie, of which two-thirds are illustrated; see Camille, ‘The Illustrated Manuscripts’. This list has been updated in Frédéric Duval and Fabienne Pomel, eds, Guillaume de Digulleville: Les Pèlerinages Allégoriques (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 425–53. Another recent important collection of essays on Deguileville’s trilogy is Nievergelt and Kamath, The Pèlerinage Allegories.

7 Deguileville, trans. Clasby, 3: 9–11.

8 Deguileville’s conscious recasting of the Roman de la Rose has been discussed at some length. See Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath, Authorship and First-Person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 19–57; Fabienne Pomel, ‘Les Modeles de la Fiction Allegorique dans les Songes-Cadres de Guillaume de Digulleville: “Romand de la Rose” et Experience Visionnaire’, in Hélène Bellon-Méguelle et al., eds, Les Moisson des Lettres: l’Invention Littéraire Autour de 1300 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011), 253–66; Fabienne Pomel, ‘Le “Roman de la Rose” Comme Voie de Paradis. Transposition, Parodie et Moralisation de Guillaume de Lorris à Jean Molinet’, in Catherine Bel and Herman Braet, De la Rose: Texte, Image, Fortune (Louvain, Paris, and Dudley, Mass.: Peeters, 2006), 355–75; and Steven Wright, ‘Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine as a “Contrepartie Edifiante” of the Roman de la Rose’, Philological Quarterly 68 (1989): 399–422.

9 For the history of the order of the sins see the classic study by Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1952, reprinted 1967), 72–74.

10 Deguileville, trans. Clasby, 88: 6481–82.

11 In the digitised State Library Victoria manuscript, Sloth is illustrated on fol. 49 (frame 106); Pride on fol. 51v (frame 111); Envy on fol. 57 (frame 122); Anger, or Ire, on fol. 61 (frame 130); Avarice on fol. 63 (frame 134); and Gluttony and Venus, or Lust, on fol. 70v (frame 149), https://viewer.slv.vic.gov.au/?entity=IE4418824&file=FL9665220&mode=browse.

12 Deguileville, trans. Clasby, 99: 7343–44.

13 Ibid., 153: 11,233–34.

14 For ‘mind pictures’ in sermons see Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960); Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 74–75, 82–104; Kimberley A. Rivers, Preaching the Memory of Virtue and Vice: Memory, Images, and Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010), esp. 253–82. Also vital to any discussion of medieval mnemonics are the two studies by Mary Carruthers: The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and The Craft of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

15 Dana M. Oswald, Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 5–6.

16 Deguileville, trans. Clasby, 99: 7351.

17 Ibid., 136: 10,048.

18 Ibid., 115: 8533–35.

19 Ibid., 99: 7352.

20 Ibid., 136: 10 and 103–10. This conception of Natura as God’s powerful vicaria, responsible for natural and moral order in the world, including human reproduction, harks back to the twelfth-century neoplatonic humanism of Chartrians such as Alan de Lille. In the Vie, Natura is reduced to yet another disgruntled old woman, the reluctant maidservant of Grace Dieu. For further discussion of Natura’s role in the Vie see Kellie Robertson, Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 177–222, and Rebecca Davis, Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 35–84.

21 Deguileville, trans. Clasby, 124: 9141–42.

22 In manuscripts of the Vie, Avarice’s idol is generally depicted as a small, classical statue of a naked figure or as a demon, such as in the State Library Victoria manuscript. See Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 268–71. As Camille points out, the idol not only refers to pagan heresies but also to the idolatry of material goods, expressed by greed for possessions and money, an aspect of Avarice that became increasingly important during the Middle Ages.

23 Sylvia Huot, Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 69. Huot distinguishes a type of demonic (male) Saracen giant that has ‘intimate contact with the unnatural, the inhuman and the damned’ (81); interestingly, female giants of courtly romance are usually described as beautiful Saracen princesses (100).

24 See Asa Simon Mittman, ‘Are the Monstrous Races “Races”?’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2015).

25 C.W.R.D. Moseley, trans., The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 116–17.

26 Deguileville, trans. Clasby, 100: 7370–74. The link between the Vie and actual travel was made explicit by Philippe de Mézières, who recommended Deguileville’s allegory to those making pilgrimages to holy sites in the east. See Kamath, Authorship and First-Person Allegory, 19.

27 The virtues were feminine personifications in part because of grammatical gender. Barbara Newman, in God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), argues that there was also a ‘cultural demand for goddesses’ (37) and that their gender made them ‘accessible as mediators not only for the intellect but also for the imagination’ (42–43).

28 Of course, the female body was also associated with the Virgin as the ‘source and container of Christ’s physicality’: see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 265. For the complexity of medieval attitudes to the body and gender, also see Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 151–238.

29 Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 2, 4 and 7.

30 For discussions of age and gender in the Middle Ages, see Shulamith Shahar, ‘The Old Body in Medieval Culture’, in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 160–86; Gretchen Mieszkowski, ‘Old Age and Medieval Misogyny: the Old Woman’, in Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2007), 299–319; Karen Pratt, ‘De Vetula: The Figure of the Old Woman in Medieval French Literature’, in Old Age in the Middle Ages, ed. Classen, 321–42; and Anne-Laure Lallouette, ‘La Viellesse dans le Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine’, in Guillaume de Digulleville, ed. Duval and Pomel, 215–28.

31 An extreme example of disgust with the old female body is recorded in Matheolus’ Liber Lamentationum Matheoluli, written at the end of the thirteenth century and translated into French by Jean Le Fèvre a century later. He describes his ageing wife as ‘so mangy, bent, humpbacked, disfigured and misshapen that she looks like a monster’. Quoted in Pratt, ‘De Vetula’, 335.

32 Bynum, Fragmentation, 221.

33 See also Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective’, Critical Inquiry 22, no. 1 (1995): 1–33. ‘Nothing entitles us to say that medieval thinkers essentialized body as matter or essentialized either body or matter as female’ (17).

34 According also with Julia Kristeva’s definition of the abject, as that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’: Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.

35 Deguileville, trans. Clasby, 95–98: 7060–61 and 7203–06.

36 Ibid., 123: 9073–84.

37 Ibid., 142: 10,545.

38 Ibid., 103: 7623–26.

39 Some manuscripts of the Vie accommodate the detail (but possibly not the emotional impact) by representing the sin in several illustrations; for example, the British Library’s Harley MS 4399 of circa 1400, which shows Pride’s bellows, horn, spurs, and club in four separate miniatures, following the first depiction of Pride and Flattery’s meeting with the pilgrim.

40 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 291–93. Carruthers also notes (315) the recommendation that memory best retains the surprising and grotesque, the violent and titillating, certainly applicable to Deguileville’s sins in the poem. Also making the argument for a synaesthetic relationship is the likelihood that the author intended that his poem to be accompanied by miniatures.

41 An example of a genre scene can be seen in a thirteenth-century copy of Laurent d’Orléans guide to virtue and vice, La Somme le Roi (London, British Library, Add MS 54180, fol. 121v), in which Idleness or Sloth is shown as a lazy ploughman resting on a hilltop. The animal tradition is demonstrated in a miniature by Maître Franςois, in a fifteenth-century manuscript, Miroir Historial de Vincent de Beauvais (Paris, BNF, MS fr. 50, fol. 25), which includes Pride as a king astride a lion, Lust as a well-dressed man riding a large monkey, and Ire depicted as a man riding a boar while angrily stabbing in the neck a man standing beside him. Other common ways of depicting the sins include diagrammatically, as a tree or wheel.

42 In a thirteenth-century English manuscript of Peraldus’s Summa de Vitiis they are shown as seven indistinguishable demons (London, British Library, Harley MS 3244, fol. 27v). Closer to the Vie is a fourteenth-century manuscript of the allegorical Voie de Paradis, adapted from Robert de Sorbon’s De Tribus Dietis (Paris, BNF, MS français 1838), but here the sins are depicted as seven identical male robbers who successively ambush the pilgrim on the road to Paradise.

43 This miniature can be viewed on the British Library website at https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=31912.

44 See British Library, https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=5704.

45 Herbert L. Kessler, Experiencing Medieval Art (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 31.

46 See Sarah Kay, The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 70–94.

47 The complex apparatus of the allegorical self is analysed by Fabienne Pomel, ‘“Je est Un Autre”: Representation et Connaissance de Soi dans le “Pèlerinage de Vie humaine” de Guillaume de Digulleville ou le Prism du “Je” Allegorique’, La France Latine (Revue d’Etudes d’Oc) nouv. series 132 (2001): 109–28.

48 Bynum, Fragmentation, 194.