There is a little shuttle train that runs two or three miles from the Princeton station to Princeton Junction where you can get on a big train going either in the direction of New York or of Trenton/Philadelphia. At the only level crossing on the shuttle line there are automatic barrier gates and flashing lights, along with a sign reading DO NOT PARK ON THE TRACKS. Some years ago an anonymous wit supplemented this sign by adding a comma and two additional words: YOU FOOL. And, indeed, public warnings of danger frequently imply a less than flattering view of the general intelligence of the citizenry: quite possibly with justification. The first time I rode on an Italian train I noted with interest an elegant brass plate reading E PERICOLOSO SPORGERSI, IT IS DANGEROUS TO LEAN OUT. I was of course immediately seized with the desire to open the window, stick my head out, and see whether there was a corresponding sign on the outside.
The more fruitful train of thought induced by the experience had to do with the dangerous words in English, by which I mean words having to do with danger. Italian is Latin in its old age, and it is easy to see the relationship between the modern pericoloso and the ancient periculosus (adjective) from periculum, danger. Now that bilingual Spanish and English signage is quite common, most people know that a freshly mopped wet floor presents peligro as well as danger. English has its own set of periculum words: peril (via the French, péril), imperil, perilous, and parlous, a wondrous adjective on life support and in need of revival. But those are all fairly fancy words. The word we ordinarily use is danger. Though everybody knows exactly what it means, it remains one of the mystery words in our tongue.
This seems as good a time as any for the mandatory digression. In 1962 I wrote a doctoral dissertation about the Romance of the Rose (Roman de la Rose), a very long French poem of the late Middle Ages, enormously popular with the aristocracy and consequently surviving in a large number of fourteenth-century manuscripts, many of which are beautifully illustrated. My hope was to use iconographic analysis (interpretation of the pictures) to help elucidate the poem’s literary meanings. It was a golden time for us, first travelling in an old Citroën Deux-Chevaux to libraries in many parts of Europe, then hunkering down in a little village in Provence to do the actual writing. This allegorical poem tells the quest of a passionate lover (Amant) in pursuit of a rosebud. (So it’s sort of like Citizen Kane, only different.)
He gains admission to a walled garden in the center of which is the fountain of Narcissus. Reflected in its pool he sees a rose of rare beauty. The rosebud begins as an emblem of a woman but increasingly and very naughtily becomes the emblem of a part of a woman. In the poem various allegorical characters help the Lover in his mad quest to possess it (her) while others hinder him. The helpers have names like Fair Welcome, Sweet Talk, and Good Looks. The chief hinderer is a gigantic, boorish guy with a big club.
It was easier to see Dangier’s narrative function—to keep the horny Lover away from rosebud—than what, exactly, his name was supposed to mean. What is obvious upon reflection is that this allegorical personification cannot represent what is meant by the modern English and French words “danger,” which is a generalized sense of peril or jeopardy. He has a specialized role within an erotic economy. He is a kind of super-chaperon. This takes us back to etymology, where we discover two rather different meanings, one of them explicable and the other still puzzling. There is in post-classical or “low” Latin a feudal term, dangerium, referring to a very strict relationship imposed by a lord upon a vassal. A fief held “in danger” was one held under specific onerous conditions all too susceptible to technical violations that could damage or ruin the subordinate party. The great seventeenth-century lexicographer of medieval Latin, Charles du Fresne, more commonly known by his title of nobility as the Sieur du Cange, wrote a mini-essay on this subject in his definition of dangerium. Danger is the power of a binding legal arrangement that carries with it great risks to one subjected to it. This is clearly the origin of the danger we may associate with the streets of Chicago, railroad crossings, slippery tiles, playing with matches, etc. The danger pictorially represented as a redneck with a club is something else. The fourteenth-century illustration I provide gives a memorable visual impression. It shows the Lover seeking admission to the garden from the doorkeeper (Oiseuse, or Idleness), with the pool of Narcissus at its center, and Danger, club over his shoulder, hulking over the high wall at the left.
Chaucer’s works contain many passages in which the adjective dangerous appears in a sense that has dropped out of modern English but obviously is related to that in the Roman de la Rose. Leaving aside the several examples that are to be found in the fragments that have survived from his Middle English translation of the French poem itself, we find the following in the great monologue of his sexiest character, the woman from Bath, usually called the Wife of Bath. This woman knows a good deal about the birds and the bees. Like the woman whom Jesus meets at Jacob’s well in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John—who is obviously her literary prototype—the woman from Bath has been married five times, “not to speak of other company in her youth”. She is a serial widow and seems even now on the prowl for a sixth marital opportunity. Her magnificent monologue, ostensibly the prologue or introduction to her short tale (about an Arthurian rapist), is actually a free-standing autobiography in verse, composed like a fine piece of music in varying tempos and movements. One movement is a recitation of her marital history. With a perversity hardly unknown in real life, she tells us that she loved her fifth and last husband best, despite the fact that he abused her and was often stand-offish. “I trowe [warrant] I loved him best, for that he/ Was of his love dangerous to me.” The extended passage, as well as many other passages in medieval texts, makes it clear that danger here means niggardliness, especially in terms of sexual availability. This fifth husband was ungenerous in addressing his wife’s sexual appetite. He was dangerous.
The meaning is sufficiently clear, perhaps, but the concept itself remains mysterious. In medieval romance, no doubt as in medieval life, sexual repression could be evidenced both in an internalized feminine timidity and as an externalized social constraint. The club or shillelagh on Dangier’s shoulder is a material exemplification of a potent social force in aristocratic circles. Christian ascetic doctrine was overtly anti-sexual, and the transmission of secular power in theory depended on the purity of bloodlines and paternal authority. Hence the attitude of “Lock up your daughters”—no small part of the function of medieval women’s religious institutions—not to mention “honor killings” and vendettas, sometimes pursued on a grand scale, as in the Trojan War. The anthropologist Mary Douglas studied some of these connections in her engaging book Purity and Danger.
Chaucer uses danger in other senses as well, including the one with which we are all familiar today. But danger as sexual parsimony, standoffishness, hard-to-getness has departed our language as mysteriously as it arrived. For no philologist has yet come up with a really satisfactory explanation of how it could relate to dangerium and the perils of narrowly defined feudal privileges. If you have one, I’d love to hear it. I myself would find it dangerous even to speculate.
