How did the Virgin Islanders . . .

Virgin Islands

. . . ever have kids? (And I wonder if there's somewhere in the world a Whore Island.)

Moon So-young: "Art in Everyday Things"

Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I

(Image from JoongAng Daily)

I subscribe to Korea's JoongAng Daily primarily because it comes with a parallel subscription to the International Herald Tribune, i.e., the international edition of the New York Times. I started reading the Tribune nearly 25 years ago, when I first lived abroad, in Switzerland, and have read it more or less continuously ever since. In lean times, I've had to depend on the library copies, but most of the time, I read it on my own dime.

Anyway, because I depend on my subscription to the JoongAng Daily for my copy of the Tribune, I make a point of reading the Daily as well . . . perfunctorily. Or I did so until a little over one month ago, when I discovered a reason to read it with interest. An article by Moon So-young, "Jesus: Savior, martyr, antitrust crusader" (February 19, 2010), captured my attention, for it analyzed, in quite intelligent, well-written English, the 1650 painting Christ Driving the Merchants from the Temple by Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678):

The work by Jordaens is a typical Baroque-style historical painting, with a wide canvas and a spectacular tableau full of people and animals engaged in dynamic movement and reactions to one another. The livestock sellers are busy trying to avoid the lash of Christ, while some people at right watch as if enjoying the scene.

One man in the center particularly attracts the eye. Still sitting in his chair, he's falling backward, screaming. Coins pour out everywhere beside him, while accounting books scatter, identifying him as a money changer.

Baroque painters frequently painted this scene for perhaps two reasons. The first is specific to the Baroque era: The episode is dramatic and is accompanied by violent action, which was appealing to the tastes of the time. But the second will be familiar to anyone outraged by a bank bailout in the aftermath of last year's financial crisis: Many of the painters just enjoyed having a good laugh at the financial elite.

In the 17th century and the time of Jesus, money changers were not just currency dealers but also offered comprehensive banking services. In particular, in 17th-century Flanders, where Jordaens lived, money changers were at the center of a major development of commerce and international trade in the region. Most of them also lent money as well, receiving interest in return.

Moon embeds her analysis of this particular painting within a larger historical analysis of the changing pictorial depictions of this scene from John's Gospel (2:13-16), and I invite you to take a look.

Yesterday's analysis by Moon, however, was of a painting political, not religious, except implicitly. The article -- "Propaganda via portrait paintings" -- offers an analysis of the above painting by an unknown artist, the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I:

In this painting, the queen dons elaborate lace, ribbons and countless strings of large pearls. It is said that she wore extremely splendid dresses like this to inspire others. She loved to wear pearls, in particular, because they symbolized purity and chastity, in keeping with her nickname "The Virgin Queen."

In the background of the portrait are two windows showing significant events during her reign. The left window depicts the Spanish Armada confronting the English fleet. Spain, the strongest power on the high seas at the time, was prospering thanks to its intense focus on trade with the Americas. But England began taking an interest in the region as well, disrupting Spanish trade. As a result, Spain attacked England in 1588.

England defended itself using ships with excellent mobility and long-range cannons, striking a victorious blow on the Spanish fleet with a fire attack. The Armada hastily retreated but was further damaged by storms. The window on the right side of the painting depicts this turbulent scene.

In the portrait, the queen's hand lies triumphantly on a globe. A closer look shows that her fingers cover the Americas -- a statement that England, which emerged as a new naval power after defeating Spain, would exercise its influence in earnest in the New World across the Atlantic. English people at the time must have felt a surge of pride for their queen when they saw the painting. What an effective piece of propaganda this is!

And a good analysis of this Armada portrait, sometimes called "the Drake version." I would have added only the religious significance of "The Virgin Queen." Elizabeth reigned in a time of religious turbulence throughout Europe, and England was still merely superficially Protestant. In the image above, we see Elizabeth as a near 'Queen of Heaven' -- ruler, anyway, of the world -- and bedecked in almost celestial glory, even to the quasi-halo of lace about her neck. During a time of spiritual confusion, her image could serve as an icon to a not-entirely-secular faith vested in England. This is part of its power and significance as propaganda (though any fine-grained analysis is complicated by the fact that the portrait was retouched by a different hand in the seventeenth century).

Moon undoubtedly knows much of this, but as a journalist, she's beholden to word limits, and what she does include in already interesting enough to keep me reading -- and to keep me looking forward to her articles, which can be found archived by the JoongAng Daily under "Art in Everyday Things."

Lady Bertilak's Gift to Gawain: luf-lace and drurye

Lady Bertilak?

Not that sort of 'girdle'...

(Image from Wikipedia)

I'm still working on my paper for the upcoming ICKS conference on "Celibacy and Enlightenment/Salvation" (August 2-3) and will likely continue right up to the deadline this coming Friday (July 6).

Thus, I'm churning out stuff like the short piece below, in which I investigate the Middle English terms drurye and luf-lace (referring to the girdel, i.e., "belt" (cf. line 1829) given him by Lady Bertilak) as part of my argument that Gawain commits adultery of the heart. The piece is still a rough draft, and I have yet a lot of reworking to do before the conference (not to mention a lot more research), but I'm posting it here in case any Medievalists should find it mildly interesting. Said Medievalists should feel free to provide advice.

The piece below follows the excursus through Part 1, Chapter 13 of Don Quixote, where Cervantes has the Don and a traveller discuss the 'pagan' practice of the knight errant as courtly lover offering an almost religious devotion to his lady:

By means of this excursus through Cervantes, we can now draw together two things happening through Gawain's acceptance of Lady Bertilak's gift. First, as just demonstrated, by accepting the 'magical' belt, Gawain objectively accepts Lady Bertilak as the object of his devotion, thereby displacing his devotion to the Virgin Mary and no longer relying upon the Virgin as his protectress. Second, by accepting Lady Bertilak's gift, Gawain makes himself her knight rather than Mary's knight and thus places himself in a relation of courtly lover to Lady Bertilak, a problematic connection since this sort of love can scarcely be distinguished from an adultery of the heart. The narrator emphasizes this latter point by two terms used in referring to this gift. After Lady Bertilak has given her 'magical' belt as a gift and left the bedroom, Gawain:

Tucked away the token the temptress had left,
Laid it reliably where he looked for it after.
(ll 1874-1875)

The Middle English word translated as "token" is actually luf-lace, literally, "love-belt." The belt is thus a love-token, a sign of Gawain's 'love' for the lady. The other term referring to Lady Bertilak's gift occurs in the passage in which Gawain puts the belt on just prior to leaving for his encounter with the Green Knight:

Yet he left not his love-gift, the lady's girdle;
Gawain, for his own good, forgot not that:
When the bright sword was belted and bound on his haunches,
Then twice with that token he twined him about.
(ll 2030-2033)

The Middle English word translated as "token" is actually drurye, which means "love-token" (or even "love-making"!). If we recall now that Gawain had also responded to Lady Bertilak's amorous glances at him at supper on the second day (cf. ll 1658-1660), then Gawain has likely fallen into an adultery of the heart so common to courtly love.

Next, in my paper at least, I'll have to deal with how Gawain's acceptance of the belt leads him to break faith with Lord Bertilak by failing to keep to their agreement to exchange each day's 'winnings', which I haven't yet mentioned on this blog.

"I'm 'a get medieval on your eyes"

Our Lady of Cardigan

Cardigan, Wales

"Go west, young man Gawain, go west..."

(Image from Mair O Aberteifi)

We left Gawain in trouble yesterday just as he had turned from devotion offered to the true heavenly queen to devotion offered to a more earthly aristocratic lady. Part of Gawain's trouble stems not from this pagan turn but from the nature of the courtly love that he accepts as part of his aristocratic culture.

I'm working on this topic (and hence boring my regular readers to tears) because the International Center for Korean Studies (ICKS) has asked me to present a paper at the ICKS International Conference on "Celibacy and Enlightenment/Salvation" (August 2-3, 2007), which will take place at Korea University. Since I've long wanted to write something about my favorite Medieval romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I'm taking this opportunity to do so ... and thereby inflicting my interests on my wary but longsuffering readers.

The connection between the theme of this conference and my Gawain paper lies in the Christian conception of humankind's fallen nature and the need for a salvation external to one's own efforts. Early in the poem, Gawain is described -- though perhaps ironically -- as an almost perfect human being, one who perfectly embodies courtly and Christian virtues. He initially manages this by paying court to the Queen of Heaven, for he can thereby fulfull the demands of both systems. Gawain, however, must fail in his efforts at perfection if this poem is intended to convey a profoundly Christian soteriological point. The nature of Gawain's failure is what links my paper to the conference theme of celibacy and salvation, for when Gawain turns from the Virgin to Lady Bertilak, the love expressed turns from spiritual to carnal, for that's the nature of courtly love.

The following is part of what I've been working on to establish the problem posed by courtly love for Gawain's attempt to remain chaste. I'm not saying anything new, of course; I'm merely trying to fill some details for scholars outside of Medieval English studies.

In the Medieval context, courtly love would ordinarily entail some problematic elements. In the ideal case, a knight devoted himself to service not only to his liege lord but also to his lord's wife, whom he was bound to protect, honor, and love. But what sort of love? Although perhaps modeled on the paradigm of the Christian's devotion to the Virgin Mary, in which case the ideal courtly love would be a highly sublimated sort of love similar to Christian caritas (cf. Edmund Reiss, "Fin'amors: Its History and Meaning in Medieval Literature," in Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (1979), 74-99), the reality is that courtly love was an unstable complex of sexual desire and spiritual aims. Francis Newman noted that courtly love was "a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and self-disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent" (Francis X. Newman, ed., The Meaning of Courtly Love (1968) vii). Similarly, C.S. Lewis described it as "love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love" (C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), page 2). From a rigorously Christian perspective, courtly love is inherently adulterous, for its practice entails that mature men express their love for an already married lady in language that powerfully emphasizes her physical beauty. From the explicit teaching of Christ as given in Matthew 5:27-28:

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

The operative word here in this King James Bible, obviously, is "lust," but we should dig a bit deeper into the past and look at the Wycliffe English translation, for John Wycliffe was a contemporary of the Pearl Poet:

Ye han herd that it was seid to elde men, Thou schalt do no letcherie. But Y seie to you, that euery man that seeth a womman for to coueite hir, hath now do letcherie bi hir in his herte. (Matheu 5:27-28: Wycliffe Bible)

But we should also check the Latin Vulgate, which the Pearl Poet would surely have known:

Audistis quia dictum est antiques: non moechaberis. Ego autem dico vobis: quoniam omnis qui viderit mulierem ad concupiscendum eam iam moechatus est eam in corde suo. (Matthaeus 5:27-28: Vulgate)

The two words are thus coueite (covet) and concupiscendum (ardent desire), and they are related etymologically. The former derives from the Latin word cupere, meaning "to desire, covet," and in the 14th century, the time of both Wycliffe and the Pearl Poet, the word coueite meant "To desire with concupiscence or with fleshly appetite" (OED I, 1106, 2), hence demonstrating why Wycliffe (or one of the Wycliffe 'team') rendered the Latin Vulgate's concupiscendum by the Middle English coueite. As for the latter term, concupiscendum, it derives from the Latin concupere (the intensive prefix con- plus cupere, thus "to long for, desire"). The related Latin term concupiscentia was taken over into English as "concupiscence" as early as the 14th century, appearing in Chaucer, The Parson's Tale (c. 1386), with the meaning of "Libidinous desire, sexual appetite, lust" (OED I, 777, 2). Given the Pearl Poet's theological interests and scriptural knowledge, he would surely be aware of Christ's teaching on adultery as a matter of lusting in one's heart.

I still need to fill out this part of my paper more completely, for I need to put my own stamp on the material, maybe liven it up a bit so that it won't be quite so boring as this blog entry.

Perhaps if I were to quote from Lady Bertilak's attempts to seduce Gawain...

On knights errant and courtly love...

Lady Bertilak at Gawain's Bed

"tempting someone else's fate"

(Image from Wikipedia)

In Part 1, Chapter 13 of Don Quixote, Cervantes has the great Knight of the Woeful Countenance describe to a fellow traveller the ennobling sufferings of a knight errant, comparing them to the rigors of a monk's life and suggesting that it is a divine calling because:

[C]hurchmen in peace and quiet pray to Heaven for the welfare of the world, but we soldiers and knights carry into effect what they pray for, defending it with the might of our arms and the edge of our swords, not under shelter but in the open air, a target for the intolerable rays of the sun in summer and the piercing frosts of winter. Thus are we God's ministers on earth and the arms by which his justice is done therein. (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, Part 1, Chapter 13 (1605), translated by John Ormsby (London, 1885))

The traveller listens carefully to the great Don's words and courteously agrees, but with a significant caveat:

"That is my own opinion," replied the traveller; "but one thing among many others seems to me very wrong in knights-errant, and that is that when they find themselves about to engage in some mighty and perilous adventure in which there is manifest danger of losing their lives, they never at the moment of engaging in it think of commending themselves to God, as is the duty of every good Christian in like peril; instead of which they commend themselves to their ladies with as much devotion as if these were their gods, a thing which seems to me to savour somewhat of heathenism." (Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part 1, Chapter 13)

In effect, the traveller is politely calling into question the very thing that he had courteously agreed to. Knights errant may believe that they are carrying out God's work in this world, but in fact, they fall into something like the pagan practice of worshipping goddesses.

Don Quixote responds by appeal to the custom among knights errant:

"Sir," answered Don Quixote, "that cannot be on any account omitted, and the knight-errant would be disgraced who acted otherwise: for it is usual and customary in knight-errantry that the knight-errant, who on engaging in any great feat of arms has his lady before him, should turn his eyes towards her softly and lovingly, as though with them entreating her to favour and protect him in the hazardous venture he is about to undertake, and even though no one hear him, he is bound to say certain words between his teeth, commending himself to her with all his heart, and of this we have innumerable instances in the histories. Nor is it to be supposed from this that they are to omit commending themselves to God, for there will be time and opportunity for doing so while they are engaged in their task." (Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part 1, Chapter 13)

The great Don has not, of course, truly responded to the traveller's criticism of the knight errant's heathen devotion to his lady, for by re-emphasizing the knight errant's practice of "entreating her to favour and protect him in the hazardous venture he is about to undertake, and ... commending himself to her with all his heart," Quixote merely restates what the traveller finds troubling.

So, naturally, the traveller politely maintains his difference of opinion:

"For all that," answered the traveller, "I feel some doubt still, because often I have read how words will arise between two knights-errant, and from one thing to another it comes about that their anger kindles and they wheel their horses round and take a good stretch of field, and then without any more ado at the top of their speed they come to the charge, and in mid-career they are wont to commend themselves to their ladies; and what commonly comes of the encounter is that one falls over the haunches of his horse pierced through and through by his antagonist's lance, and as for the other, it is only by holding on to the mane of his horse that he can help falling to the ground; but I know not how the dead man had time to commend himself to God in the course of such rapid work as this; it would have been better if those words which he spent in commending himself to his lady in the midst of his career had been devoted to his duty and obligation as a Christian." (Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part 1, Chapter 13)

Cervantes, perhaps writing these words around 1600, was not the first to note the problem posed to the Christian knight by the practice of courtly love. In the latter 14th century, the Pearl Poet implicitly sets up the problem in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by first presenting Gawain as a good Christian knight:

And all his fealty was fixed upon the five wounds
That Christ got on the cross, as the creed tells;
And wherever this man in melee took part,
His one thought was of this, past all things else,
That all his force was founded on the five joys
That the high Queen of heaven had in her child.
And therefore, as I find, he fittingly had
On the inner part of his shield her image portrayed,
That when his look on it lighted, he never lost heart.
(Pearl Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Marie Borroff (1967), Part 2, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1, Seventh Edition, page 172, lines 642-650)

Gawain, a good Christian knight, maintains devotion to the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, which therefore makes him Mary's knight (cf. line 1769) and thus protected against falling into the heathen practice of courtly devotion to a mere woman.

Yet Gawain's courtesy and concern for his own life move him to accept from the beautiful Lady Bertilak the gift of a purportedly magical green belt interlaced with threads of gold that will supposedly protect him from an otherwise certain death:

She released a knot lightly, and loosened a belt
That was caught about her kirtle, the bright cloak beneath,
Of a gay green silk, with gold overwrought,
And the borders all bound with embroidery fine,
And this she presses upon him, and pleads with a smile,
Unworthy though it were, that it would not be scorned.
But the man still maintains that he means to accept
Neither gold nor any gift, till by God's grace
The fate that lay before him was fully achieved.
"And be not offended, fair lady, I beg,
And give over your offer, for ever I must

decline.

I am grateful for favor shown
Past all deserts of mine,
And ever shall be your own
True servant, rain or shine."

"Now does my present displease you," she promptly inquired,
"Because it seems in your sight so simple a thing?
And belike, as it is little, it is less to praise,
But if the virtue that invests it were verily known,
It would be held, I hope, in higher esteem.
For the man that possesses this piece of silk,
If he bore it on his body, belted about,
There is no hand under heaven that could hew him down,
For he could not be killed by any craft on earth."
Then the man began to muse, and mainly he thought
It was a pearl for his plight, the peril to come
When he gains the Green Chapel to get his reward:
Could he escape unscathed, the scheme were noble!
The he bore with her words and withstood them no more.
And she repeated her petition and pleaded anew,
And he granted it, and gladly she gave him the belt,
And besought him for her sake to conceal it well,
Lest the noble lord should know -- and the knight agrees
That not a soul save themselves shall see it thenceforth

with sight.

He thanked her with fervent heart,
As often as ever he might;
Three times, before they part,
She has kissed the stalwart knight.

(Pearl Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Marie Borroff, Part 2, Norton Anthology, Volume 1, page 196, lines 1830-1869)

Up until this moment, Gawain has courteously refused to accept any gift from the lady, for in the act of accepting a parting gift from a lady, a knight setting off on a quest is implictly accepting the lady herself as his lady. By accepting the magical belt, Gawain has exchanged the higher Queen of Heaven for the lower Lady Bertilak and thus relinquished the Virgin's protection from harm in return for Lady Bertilak's protection.

In this manner does Gawain lose his status as Mary's knight and adopt the practice of other knights errant, who "commend themselves to their ladies with as much devotion as if these were their gods, a thing which seems ... to savour somewhat of heathenism," and by accepting Lady Bertilak, he does, as do other knights with their ladies, "turn his eyes towards her softly and lovingly, as though ... entreating her to favour and protect him in the hazardous venture he is about to undertake," as both the traveller and Don Quixote, respectively, have already noted.

In doing so, ironically, Gawain falls into a well-constructed trap and puts his life at risk ... but that is a longer story.