Meditating on Moonshine

Just now, it’s all about the moon.  When I saw it rising so huge and luminous last night it seemed to have the unreal mineral color of the crayons and magic markers used by children to depict it.  It was so low in the eastern sky that we had to walk all the way to the bottom of the dark garden, beyond the stone wall and into the open field, to see it above the tree line in its fullness.  It is still magnificent this morning as I write this.  It is still fairly low, but now in the west, still magnificent but further away, as though it were perched just above Denver or maybe even San Francisco.

            It is a “blue moon”—a wonderful term that, like so many in popular culture, has no absolute or fixed conventional meaning beyond its suggestion of rarity.  Growing up I was taught that a blue moon was a second full moon falling within a single calendar month.  Since there are only twenty-nine and a half days within a lunar month it is inevitable that the “irregularity” will occur, though of course it didn’t this month.  This blue moon—which is also in some parts called green and red—is of a different astronomical hue.  When I was a kid full moons of August or September were often called “corn” moons.  Insofar as I thought about it I connected the idea with the color of corn on the cob; but I now suppose the term must preserve the older English sense of corn as grain, and thus be identical with a “harvest moon”.

            Apparently it is a fact well known to students of abnormal psychology and criminologists that at the full moon there is a discernible spike in aberrant and sinister behavior.  One of the former presidents of my university—who like all heads of large and complex organizations had to deal with a certain number of cranks and eccentrics—maintained a drawer in a file cabinet actually labelled “Full Moon Mail”.  But last night’s blue moon was so pure and inspirational that I expect to read in tomorrow’s press of a dramatic spike in altruism.

            The moon, like so many very old things, looks better at a distance.  We now have all seen demythologizing close-ups and real time moon walks and fragments of drab moon rocks indistinguishable from road gravel.  I shall persevere in my attempt to see the moon through medieval eyes.

            For where we see on the full moon’s surface the faint outlines of irregular geological shapes, of craters, hillocks and ravine slopes, our medieval ancestors, if they tried hard enough, could see something rather more interesting: the Man in the Moon!  The Man in the Moon had the form of a peasant earthling—an old man who bore upon his back a bundle of thorny faggots.  If you looked really hard you could sometimes see also the man’s little dog, as unimposing as its master, walking at his side.

            There were disparate explanations of who the Man in the Moon was, and how he got there.  The admirable Rev’d Sabine Baring-Gould, M.A., the great Anglican hagiographer, has written learnedly of these explanations, most of which are a variants on the theme of the Wandering Jew.*  The Man in the Moon was perhaps a scoffing Sabbath-breaker who gathered wood when he should have been at his prayers.  His punishment—a contrapasso worthy of Dante—is forever to bear his heavy and prickly burden across the face of the moon, so far distant as to be beyond even death.  There are many other folk reminiscences of the ancient belief.  It may well be that Jack and Jill fetching their pail of water distantly reflect an Old Norse version of the legend.

            We have a few early iconographic representations of the Man in the Moon.  One of the most curious is a sigil.  Among the documents in the Public Record Office in London is one dated ix Edward III (i.e., 1335), which has a wonderful Man-in-the-Moon seal with the following circular Latin inscription: te waltere docebo cur spinas phebo gero.  In English this would be “Walter, I will teach you why I carry brambles to the moon”.  How one might wish to be able to meet this whimsical Walter—supposing that he himself was the designer of the seal!

            That is impossible, lacking a Time Machine.  But we all know the “rude mechanicals” whose rehearsal of “Pyramis and Thisbe”—the play within the play of Midsummer-Night’s Dream--is one of the finest things in Shakespeare.  At one point (Act III, scene1) Quince, Bottom, and Snout are discussing the technical difficulties posed in staging their play.

            Quince:…But there is two hard things; that is, to bring the moonlight into a chamber; for you know, Pyramus and Thisby meet by moonlight.

            Snout: Doth the moon shine that night we play our play?

            Bottom: A calendar, a calendar!  Look in the almanac: find out moonshine, find out moonshine!

            Quince: Yes, it doth shine that night.

            Bottom: Why, then may you have a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open, and the moon may shine in on the casement.

            Quince: Ay, or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lanthorn, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine….

*in Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (London, 1866)

Just Kydding Around

Obscure literary erudition appears on the front page of the Times infrequently, so that when it does your bloguiste must sit up and take notice.  An energetic English professor at the University of Texas, Douglas Bruster, following in the traces of a British scholar named Brian Vickers, had advanced the theory that there is more to Shakespeare than we ever imagined.  Specifically there are some mysterious gobbets of text in Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (or Hieronimo is Mad Again) that first show up in the printed quarto of 1602.  The play itself was probably written about 1590. Thomas Kyd shed this mortal coil in 1596.  We have no idea whether he and Shakespeare had ever laid eyes on each other, though Shakespeare had certainly laid eyes on his play, which he plundered pretty thoroughly in writing Hamlet.

            There are pendulum swings in scholarship as in so many aspects of cultural life.  For more than a century it was all the rage to argue that Shakespeare didn’t really write most of Shakespeare, or maybe even any of him.   This might be called the “college graduate theory” advanced by—well, college graduates.  The supposed plays of Shakespeare exhibit extraordinary invention, wit, and (yes) erudition.  But we have it on the authority of Ben Jonson that Shakespeare had “small Latine & lesse Greeke.”  How is somebody like that going to write King Lear or come up with three-guinea words like Lady Macbeth’s “incarnadine”? 

            Nobody paused to ask why we should be so impressed by the educational authority of somebody who can’t even spell “Latin” or “Greek” correctly.  Instead they rushed on to attribute pseudo-Shakespeare’s plays to somebody else, and especially to Francis Bacon, who was very smart and a Cambridge man who habitually wrote out his shopping lists in correctly accented Greeke.

            The Baconian heresy eventually drowned in the sea of its own Rosicrucian cryptograms.  As the pendulum swings back, the current tendency—it might be called “Shakespearian maximalism”—is to try to foist off on the Bard, in addition to his own stuff,  a dubious assortment of unclaimed freight languishing about in Elizabethan songbooks.  The suggestion that Shakespeare was the author of some or all of the additions to the old text of the Spanish Tragedy found in the 1602 quarto is among the most plausible, and most ably argued; but in my view it is still iffy. 

           

            Admiration for the Roman writer Seneca accounts for the popular theme of gory revenge on the Elizabethan stage. The Spanish Tragedy is not quite the goriest of such spectacles, but it is right up there.  Hieronimo, Marshal of Spain, plots a grisly revenge for the murder of his son Horatio, which involves the device of a “play within the play,” with a principal villain named Soliman.  In the 1602 quarto Hieronimo’s speeches, and the dreadful pageant of Soliman, are considerably expanded.  In one of the additions, in which Hieronimo madly or ironically suggests that the murder of a man’s son should cause no greater discomfort than the slaughter of a domestic animal, Professor Bruster finds a significant clue:

What is there yet in a sonne,

To make a father dote, raue, or runne  mad?

Being borne, it poutes, cryes, and breeds teeth.

What is there yet in a sonne?  He must be fed,

Be taught to goe, and speake.  I, or yet? [14]

Why not a man loue a Calfe as well?

Or melt in passion ore a frisking Kid,

As for a Sonne?  Methinks a young Bacon

Or a fine little smooth Horse-colt

Should mooue a man, as much as doth a sonne.  [Act 3, sc 11. Lines 10-19]

Bruster is not the first to note the crux in line 14, but he is certainly has an original and engaging theory about it.  It is this: Shakespeare is the writer who supercharged Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, but he had terrible handwriting.  In old manuscripts punctuation is highly arbitrary and often lacking, so that what we are reading on a page is always half the work of a Renaissance printer or a modern editor or both.  What does “I, or yet?” mean—apart from nothing, that is.  According to Bruster “I, or” is probably the printer’s misreading of Shakespeare’s abbreviation (Ier) of the name of Hieronimo, speaker of the lines!

Strange textual accidents do happen.  In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the worldly wise Pandarus tries to cheer up the heartbroken Troilus, abandoned by Criseyde.  Women are like the M4 bus, he assures him.  Another one comes by every twelve minutes:

“And ek, as writ Zanzis, that was ful wys.

‘The newe love out chaceth ofte the olde’.”  [4.414/15]

            Trouble is, nobody has ever heard of a wise old writer named “Zanzis”.  The sentiment sounds like Ovid to me, but scholars have found something vaguely like it Seneca, a name Chaucer habitually spells as a disyllable (Senec, Senek).  Now if a copyist didn’t know who Senek was, and if in the original manuscript there was a marginal gloss explaining that he was “L[ucius] Annæus,” and if the L looked very like a Z, then he might have thought the name was Zannæus, or in English Zanzis.  QED.

            My hesitation with this part of Bruster’s argument must be tentative, since so far I know only what I read in the papers.  But I would note that Hieronimo is already thirteen lines into a speech at this point.  Furthermore one doesn’t normally indicate the speaker in the middle of a line.

            How goes King my good lady?

            O! My dear Queen husband!  Passing fair, withal.

Further furthermore if you remove the “I, or” you are left with a seriously infirm seven-syllable line ending with a formal conjunctive adverb.

a young Bacon

           Ashley Thorndyke, editor of the two volumes of The Minor Elizabethan Drama in the Everyman’s Library, accepts the common emendation of reading “Ay, or…” at the end of line 14, thus beginning a new, coherent, and plausible sentence.  The anonymous Bryn Mawr undergraduate of the 1920s (the original owner of my set) wrote thus, in ink, at the top of the Dramatis Personae page of the Kyd drama: “Italicized portions written by Ben Jonson.”  She undoubtedly knew that the Latin word for sun is sol—so that the name of the archvillain in the play within the play (Soliman) might mean sonne-manne.   She had looked carefully at the italicized speeches, especially, perhaps, the following lines:

What is there yet in a sonne? …

Why not a man loue a Calfe as well?

Or melt in passion ore a frisking Kid,

As for a Sonne?  Methinks a young Bacon…

 a frisking Kyd

Oh, rare Ben Jonson!  Well done.

 in the poet's corner, Westminster Abbey

Cheap Highs

            I just hit the “Latest Headlines” button on my default tool bar to discover that the first twelve news headlines, by actual count, all announce bad news on a spectrum from international catastrophe to crying shame.  Number thirteen is “Longest animal memory ‘in dolphins’,” which under the circumstances I grasp as good news only a little less momentous than the Second Coming—or at least the Relief of Lucknow.  I want to introduce a new tool bar button based in one of the old Anglican prayers—“All the Blessings of This Life”.

            For several days our weather has been magnificent—clear and fresh, warm but not hot.  Above all the sweet air has been blessedly dry.  Even through incipient cataracts the appearance of the big trees at the edge of the field behind us has something of the flavor of an old stereopticon card, with each green leaf sharply individuated and articulate.  I was taken back half a century to my reading of Wölfflin’s distinction between Ruysdael and Hobbema in his Principles of Art History—one of those life-changing books that, though not brought explicitly to mind for years on end, are as clearly among the blessings of this life as are dry air and oak leaves themselves.

            It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good.  One of the local silver linings in the storm clouds attendant upon Hurricane Sandy is a residual lifetime supply of good firewood.  Last winter I did a certain amount of harvesting, sawing logs from fallen trees in the common ground into burnable lengths, and a neighbor gave me all the best parts of a severely damaged large oak tree she had to have felled in her back yard.  I have been splitting these the old-fashioned way, with wedges and sledge, then chopping them to convenient size by axe.  This takes me back in memory not fifty but sixty years to a world in which all domestic heating and cooking used wood-burning stoves.  Four big mounds of cut cordwood just beyond the stone wall have the place looking like a commercial New England wood lot.  Just think of the cozy January evenings we have in store.

            That the best things in life are free I learned at my mother’s knee.  Its codicil I had to learn on my own: some of the second best come from the Dollar Store.  I don’t like to shill for commercial products on this blog, but I must make an exception for White Rain’s “Cool Ocean Wave For Men”, which advertises itself as “Shampoo, Conditioner, Body Wash”—in short “An Invigorating Clean All in One Step”. 

            I love the multiplex product.  I well remember the night Joan and I joined the middle class.  It was in the autumn of 1963, and I had just received my first paycheck for my first real job.  We thought it was time to buy a bottle of wine, just like the big people.  We found a jug of something called “Guild Vino da Tavola”.  The label read thus: “This wine is delicious with red meat, chicken, fish, or pasta.  Serve at room temperature or chilled if you prefer.”

            Well, Ocean Wave is not unlike Guild Vino da Tavola in its hue.  It is a purply blue jizz of the consistency of grape jelly that didn’t quite jell.  It takes fourteen lines of very long words in very small type to list all chemicals in this concoction, and it is definitely one of the blessings of this life.  Naturally you cannot expect that something that cost a buck per quart will actually wash the chlorine out of my hair.  Once a week I try to accomplish that goal with something from the Seven-Dollar Store (alias CVS).

            For I begin most days with a serious swim at the old gymnasium on campus.  The vagaries of the summer shuttle schedule require me to walk a scant half mile to catch a six o’clock bus, which takes me most of the rest of the way.  Returning, I do the trip in reverse, walking the last half mile home.   Life doesn’t really get much better than this: walking through a sun-drenched early morning toward pineapple chunks or stewed prunes following a good swim, a close shave, and an indulgent shower with lavish applications of Cool Ocean Wave.  I cannot fathom why the experience never features in “Latest Headlines”.  It does seem to me to rank right up there with dolphin nmemonics.

 Lahore: the Shalamar

            My wonderful uncle John was a high-school dropout, but from an era when high-school dropouts were often better educated than today’s bachelors of arts.  He quoted poetry incessantly, one of his favorite collections being India’s Love Lyrics of “Laurence Hope” (Adela Nicolson).  One of these, a sort of Orientalist “Dear John” letter in verse, starts “Pale hands I loved beside the Shalamar…”  After an invigorating one-step clean with Cool Ocean Wave the human body retains for an hour or two the faintest aroma of pale hands beside the Shalamar—or is it a Levantine bagnio?  We heartily thank Thee—for all the blessings of this life!

Out of Synch

When the reviewer of my new book for the Washington Post began by invoking Jung’s theory of “synchronicity” I had an uneasy feeling, since synchronicity hasn’t always worked out all that well for me.  In this instance things were hardly grave.  It meant that somebody else had also had “my” bright idea of writing a book about Enlightenment esotericism, and that the two books had appeared at approximately the same time.  I’ll get around to reading the other one at some point.  For the time being I’m satisfied by the venal information that I am outselling it two to one.  Of course it would be better if that were a ratio rather than the actual number of books sold in a week.

            Synchronicity snuck up on me in another way.  Only two weeks ago I wrote a post about what I called “dead letter scholarship”, essays written for collections that never get published.  That very week I got a dunning letter about an essay I thought I had finessed, and therefore not even thought about.  It turned out that the editor, on the other hand, had been thinking about it pleasurably for some time, and looked forward to reading it soon, confident as she claimed to be that I would certainly make the deadline—July 31^st!  The boot was apparently on the other foot.  Dead letter scholarship is distressing, but deadbeat scholarship is even worse.  The deadbeat scholar is a wretch, scorned and rejected of men.

            Thus I have been beavering away for the last few days on a short  essay on “The Structure of the Pearl”--the Pearl being, as I shall briefly explain in a moment, a very beautiful fourteenth-century English poem.  Since the deadline is actually today, I am going to have to grant myself a forty-eight hour reprieve, but by the end of the week I shall hope to have unburdened my conscience.  Getting into this mess involved not synchronicity but another feature of my professional career—in addition to recurrent mental aberration, that is. I have been haunted by what might be called “reputation lag”.  Publishing an essay on some obscure subject should not have the force of a religious vow to forsake all other obscure subjects in perpetuity, but I am freuqently asked to talk or write about something I established my “expertise” on in middle school.

             I believe that it was in 1982—before more than half the readers of this blog were even born—that I wrote something about the structure of the Pearl.  I haven’t thought a whole lot about it since.  None of us can dictate the way that others will think about us, but it is terribly cruel to have to imagine that someone has been thinking, as I passed by on the street: “Oh, there goes whatzisname?  You know, the expert on the structure of the Pearl.” 

 Reunion of the Poet and the Pearl: A River Runs Through It

            The Pearl is one of the most beautiful poems in our literature, but today’s readers are precluded from its easy appreciation by several daunting problems.  Its language is very difficult—considerably more difficult than that of Chaucer, of whom the Pearl-poet was a contemporary.  It is written in a Midland dialect—not in the London dialect that became the basis of modern literary English.  It is full of unrecognizable words, often chosen to satisfy the technical requirements of internal rhyme, or alliteration, as we usually call it—a poetic form with which we are not generally familiar.   Its narrative element is slight and its precise subject matter—concerning which even medievalists are by no means of one mind—often elusive.  In a nut, or rather oyster shell, it is this.  A man laments at great length that he lost a perfectly exquisite pearl in a garden.  It fell “through the grass to ground”.  Further details make it seem that he is probably talking about the loss of a young daughter.  Later, a beautiful young girl appears in the poem to engage the narrator in heavy theological rap.  She explains that if only he could see the reality of things he would be joyous rather than despondent.  For his lost pearl is now one of the 144,000 virgins cavorting around the Lamb in the New Jerusalem, as described in the Apocalypse of John.

            The Pearl exists in a unique manuscript, along with a few others by the name author, including the priceless Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  The poet was knee-deep in number mysticism.  Sir Gawain is all about five, which is why it has 101 25-line stanzas for a total of 2525 lines.  Pearl is all about twelve, which is why it has 101 12-line stanzas for a total of 2525 lines.  If you want to know about the 101, you will have to wait until I finish my essay, should I in fact do so.

 Sir Robert Cotton

The manuscript, now in the British Library, is known as “Cotton Nero A. x”.  Its one-time owner, Sir Robert Cotton (1570-1631), had a wonderful library of old books shelved in a number of elegant architectural bays, each of which was presided over by the sculpted bust of a Roman Emperor.  The notation “Nero A. x” meant that this manuscript was the tenth book from the left on the first shelf of Nero’s biblio-bay.

one mean librarian

Lady Justice Coloring Book

(crayons sold separately)

I did not intend to write an essay about Trayvon Martin and/ or George Zimmerman.  To say the same thing slightly more emphatically, I intended not to write about Tayvon Martin and/or George Zimmerman.  I did not regard myself as competent to do so.  Early on I did not follow even the journalistic presentation of the matter thoroughly or thoughtfully.  Daily summaries of the actual course of the trial left me with impressions but no confident conclusions, certainly with none that would authorize me to give public endorsement of—let alone second guess--a jury that showed every sign of having taken up its unpleasant duties with seriousness.  Furthermore, though I hope I sometimes have interesting contributions to make on the often whimsical topics I take up in my blog, I am far from believing that my political or social opinions are of general interest.  As for their authority, they rarely win approval, let alone agreement, even within my own family.

            We now arrive at the but.  I just came upon a brief article, based in a supposedly objective statistical survey, concerning public attitudes toward the acquittal of Zimmerman.  More than half of white people asked felt certain that the jury’s decision was the right one.  Less than ten percent of black people did.  A few days ago President Obama spoke movingly and convincingly to white Americans in the following terms: “I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn’t go away.”

            Mr. Obama referenced his own personal experience, as I must reference mine, comparatively trivial though it be.  I was immediately taken back in my mind to the afternoon of October 3, 1995.  About 1pm (Eastern Time) I was sitting around a large conference table with fifteen or more other members of the “Race Relations Task Force” of Princeton University: an impressive group of student leaders, professors, and administrators, about half of whom were black people.  The brown-bag lunch meetings of this earnest and well-intentioned group were generally useful but also sometimes somniferous.  Not today.  People came and went, discreetly, as their schedules demanded, and about one o’clock a newcomer arrived bearing the news of the O. J. Simpson verdict: “Not Guilty!”  

            I have possibly experienced a more ironic moment of professional life, but if so I cannot think of it now.  All the blacks broke out in more or less effusive expressions of delight.  Most of the white people, certainly including me, succumbed to the affect of having recently ingested a bad clam.  That is how the “Race Relations Task Force” of a great university related to race on this particular occasion.

            This was for me a difficult moment, for I fear that I had indeed come to a rather firm conclusion concerning O. J. Simpson’s role in the death of his wife Nicole.  But I could still tell myself that I hadn’t been there, I hadn’t heard everything that the jury had heard, and that “the jury had spoken”.  Perhaps I succeeded in convincing myself that it was at least conceivable that Simpson was innocent.  But there was a greater challenge yet to come.  

            Among my most distinguished colleagues at that time was Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Soon after the conclusion of the trial our excellent student newspaper ran its own article on “campus reactions” to the trial’s outcome.  A student reporter interviewed Toni Morrison, who was quoted as saying something I found quite fantastic.  She could think of no way in fact or in fiction that Simpson could have been guilty of the murder!  I am working from memory here, but Ms. Morrison’s general views on the matter have been documented elsewhere, and can be consulted.

            Now when one of the world’s great imaginative writers tells you something empirically probable is so impossible that she cannot allow even a fictional version of it, it may be time to reassess the meaning of meaning, and revive the doctrine of the plurality of truths.  In the thirteenth century some Christian followers of the Arab philosopher Averroës (1126-1198) developed a doctrine of the “double truth”.   Philosophical truth was one thing, theological truth another.  For example, Aristotle had held that the world was eternal; but the Scriptures spoke of a creation in time.  So the eternality of the world was “philosophically true” while the temporality of the world was “theologically true”.   So long as there was no forced confrontation or reconciliation of the two, an uneasy intellectual equilibrium could prevail.  Though few people realize it, our term “politically correct” had a similar theoretical origin in Marxist thought.  What is “politically correct” is the secular equivalent of what in the old sacred realm was “theologically correct”.

            I conclude that in the matter of Trayvon Martin and/or George Zimmerman an appeal to the truth is predestined to fail.  This is not merely because of the contested interpretations of meager and ambiguous evidence, but because different interpreters seek a definitive privilege for one or another of plural truths.  There is only what might be called instrumental or functional or legal truth in the verdict of a jury of one’s peers, supported by protocols of judicial review, but it is a truth nonetheless.  It is too much to hope for philosophy or theology.  Nobody sentient is likely to judge the American system of jurisprudence to be perfect.  But sins of commission are here worse than sins of omission.  That is why the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti will remain an "everlasting wrong" and that of Orenthal James Simpson a bizarre episode in popular culture.  Nobody with even a vague historical sense should lightly badmouth one of the undoubted foundations of our precious liberties, let alone replace it with the judgments of surveys in the popular press, the opinions of talking heads, or the organizers of on-line petitions.

           

Dead Letter Scholarship

 

 Where great ideas go to die

Most people are probably familiar with the alliterative advice given to fledgling professors: “Publish or perish.”  It means that the publication of scholarly research is a requirement of keeping a professorial position in an academic institution.  In general scholarly publication is a necessary but insufficient requirement for academic success.  Publishing your essay on “The Incidence of Incest among Lace-Makers in Seventeenth-Century Toulouse”—in a “good journal,” of course—cannot guarantee your advancement to a tenured position, but failing to publish it can seal your doom.

            These circumstances partly account for the generally uninspiring character of large swaths of the academic press—the thin books that might have made a tolerable journal article, the thin journal article that might have sustained a cocktail-party conversation for a minute or two.  Horace thought you ought to keep a finished manuscript in your drawer for nine years while you thought about the wisdom of publishing it.  But of course by then a junior professor would already be entering the third year of a second career as a taxi driver.

            In the calculus of academic evaluation books rank considerably higher than journal articles, but they are also more difficult to write.  Hence the academic vogue of the “edited volume”—and with it my eventual topic, the dead letter essay.  You dream up a topic and a title—Incest and Lace-Making: New Perspectives, perhaps.  Then you invite eight or ten desperate youngsters to contribute essays to your volume.  There were, after all, lace-makers in Genoa, Prague, Ghent, and Allentown PA as well as in Toulouse, plenty to go around.  And if they didn’t practice incest they sometimes had indigestion, which is close enough for volumes of this genre.  Eight or ten young scholars can add an item to the “Articles” subsection of their bibliographies, and you get to add a whole book!

            If you can actually get the book published, that is.  There has been known to be a certain slippage twixt cup and lip.  In my second year of professorial life (1964) I succumbed to the flattering invitation of a senior scholar who had the great plan of publishing a book of essays with new perspectives on every one of Chaucer’s tales.  I knocked myself out writing the greatest essay ever penned on the “Summoner’s Tale.”  It is also the greatest never read, because never published.  It was the first in what was to become a rather thick file of my dead letter essays.
             Full many a flower is born to bloom unseen

            And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

 world's largest dart board?

            Hardly less disconcerting than the editorial death of a laboriously written essay is its resurrection from the dead after considerably more than three days.  Hanging on a wall in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle is a huge wooden disk that looks like the largest dartboard in Britain.  According to a black-letter legend encircling the bull’s eye “This is the rounde table of king Arthur with xxiiii of his namyd knightes.”  What is it—besides being a Tudor fake, that is?  In the early 1970s I was recruited by an eminent but feckless proposer of edited volumes to write the lead essay for a book that would study every conceivable aspect of this bizarre artifact—artisinal, art historical, calligraphical, carbon-dendrological—you name it.  My assignment, should I choose to accept (as in a moment of temporary cerebral intermission I did) was to write a synoptic essay on “The Round Table in Literature and Legend”.  Arthurian literature is not exactly a small topic, and to work up such an essay from scratch was an enormous labor. I was accordingly rather miffed when it turned out to be a dead letter.

            Fast forward twenty-five years.  A strange contraption called the computer is now a common sight in academic offices.  I have sired children, and they have graduated from college.  My temples are gray.  I am an alleged eminence myself.  Out of the blue—Cambridge blue, in this instance—I receive an urgent communication from an editor informing me that after “some delay” my essay is about to be published.  Would I be good enough to make a quick review of the scholarship of the last quarter century to see whether my footnotes might require some tweaking!

            All this comes to mind because of a message from the editorial tomb received only this week.  Marjorie Reeves (1905-2003), an Oxford historian, was the world’s greatest expert on Joachim of Fiore and medieval millennialism generally.  She was a lovely woman and person of extraordinary moral vibrancy.  She played a significant role in my life and that of my wife, who had been an undergraduate at her college, Saint Anne’s, Oxford.  She is the only scholar with whom I have jointly published a book.

Marjorie Reeves (1905-2003)

           
          When her centenary hove into view as the twentieth century departed, I was happy to fall in with a plan proposed by a scholar in Germany to contribute to an “edited volume” in Ms. Reeves’s honor.  The editor was a woman unknown to me—perhaps not a promising  augury in retrospect.  But I wrote the essay and sent it off—straight to the dead letter office, or in this instance the Abteilung für unzustellbare Briefe.  Marjorie Reeves eventually died, and while I shall never forget her I had long since put her stillborn festschrift out of mind by the time I retired in 2006.  Guess what?

Tale of Two Suppers

“Christ was the word that spake it,
He took the bread and he brake it;
And what the word did make it;
That I believe, and take it."

                     attributed to Queen Elizabeth I

            The New Jersey climate—at least the summer climate--is semi-tropical.  If you leave your garden unattended for a two week period the results are fairly dramatic.  It took about one full and seriously jet-lagged week, dodging thunderstorms, even to get all areas of the lawn mowed.  It was more like hay making than grass cutting.  The tomatoes were in dire need of staking, and the basil plants already threatening to go to seed.  But I finally have that all tidied up and looking gorgeous, and have been able to turn to the brute labor of the firewood, the abundant if ambiguous gift of hurricane Sandy.

            In short we had fairly well regained a sense of domestic control, and it was almost with a feeling of equanimity that we took a long afternoon off on Sunday to go into the city.  The purpose of the trip was pure pleasure: an unexpected chance to have supper with dear friends of more than forty years, Jim and Hester Magnuson, who were in town briefly from Austin. 

            As our meeting time was not until seven, we had the late afternoon free, and we knew just how to spend it.  It is a short walk from Penn Station at Thirty-Third and Seventh Avenue to the Morgan Library at Thirty-Sixth and Madison, though the heat was sufficiently oppressive to make us appreciate our air conditioned arrival.  The Morgan is one of the crown jewels of the City, and at any given moment it usually has mounted a couple of what I think of as “two hour” exhibitions—meaning that a motivated viewer can really do them justice in a two-hour visit.  What had caught my eye in the Friends’ Letter was a new show entitled “Illuminating Faith: the Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art”.

            The Morgan’s collection of medieval liturgical books is of course superb.  Even so, I had wondered beforehand whether they would be able to find enough quality objects on such a specialized topic.  I need not have worried.  The Eucharist (Mass, Divine Liturgy, Holy Communion, Lord’s Supper) is the central sacrament of Greek Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Anglicanism, and it plays an important role in most Protestant churches as well.  In the Roman Church of the later Middle Ages—from which all the Morgan’s materials are drawn—there were a number of dramatic innovations that encouraged an efflorescence of Eucharistic iconography.

           

The Corpus Christ festival in the Middle Ages            

The first of these was the invention of a major new  festival—Corpus Christi Day—to be devoted to the cult of Christ as present in the Eucharist.  An ecstatic nun, Saint Juliana of Liège (1192-1258), instructed by a private vision, made it her life’s work to promote the institution of the new feast.  One of her close spiritual friends was a local canon who happened later to become Pope Urban IV. According to the Bible the Last Supper took place on the evening of Maundy Thursday, the day before the Crucifixion.  But that day was already liturgically heavy with the ancient mournful solemnities of Passiontide.  Another Thursday was needed, and the festival of Corpus Christi was somewhat arbitrarily assigned to the Thursday after Trinity Sunday.  Trinity Sunday is not a fixed date, but it always falls in high summer.  One need not be a cynic to see that, in a world dominated by hard agricultural labor, St. Juliana’s spiritual enthusiasm might not be the only reason that a major new midweek holiday in the midsummer sun was not slow to catch on.

            It is a very strange thing for a man to hold up a piece of bread and say “This is my body;” and Christians have been, and remain, seriously divided about the meaning of it.  Large swaths of the medieval laity, by definition illiterate, pretty clearly had a magical view of the Mass.  Indeed the phrase hocus-pocus derives from the priest’s words of consecration, “Hoc est corpus meum”.  By the thirteenth century learned Roman Catholic doctrine had settled on transubstantiation.  However, that was itself a novelty unknown to the early Christian centuries.  For before you can believe in transubstantiation you have to be able to believe in substantiation in the first place.  This is a feature of the scholastic metaphysical doctrine that essentially tries to reconcile Plato and Aristotle in holding that the things of the material world have a double nature.  They have on the one hand essence or substance—the immutable “thingness” of them, so to speak.   But they also have accidence—inessential phenomenal qualities such a color, texture, weight, and so on.  The host (Latin hostia, “a sacrifice”) retains the outward accidence of a thinly pressed bread wafer but becomes in its substance the “body of Christ”.

            The cultural importance of the old feast of Corpus Christi was considerable.  Around it grew up much of the rich drama of the mystery cycles.  The Corpus Christi processions—which still exist in many parts of the world--were often magnificent.  The Eucharist (in the form of a consecrated host exposed in a monstrance or ostensorium, essentially a fancy liturgical picture frame) was reverently paraded not merely around the grounds of the great churches and monasteries, but through the residential and commercial streets of the towns and cities.  In Paris and elsewhere the bourgeois honored the Eucharist by laying out for display along the route all their most precious movables: golden vessels and silver plate, expensive clothing, jewelry, personal household images and icons.

            Some thinkers (like Queen Elizabeth) preferred to allow mysteries to remain mysterious.  The attempt to render visible an invisible spiritual world was to be sure one of the great engines of medieval art, but it also led to problems.  Several of these are hinted at in the current Morgan exhibition.  It is from the period of the most intense investment in the cult of Corpus Christi that various extravagances emerged—especially a superabundance of reports of walking, talking, and bleeding hosts.  For the Reformers the festival became a flashpoint of Eucharistic controversy, especially in the Spanish Netherlands, where the processions were on occasion attacked by mobs.  The Corpus Christi feast was abolished in all the churches of the Reform on the grounds stated by one of the Anglican Articles of Religion: “The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them”.  I think it should be entirely without controversy, however, to recommend a brief gaze at the sumptuous materials gathered at the Morgan Library, where they will be on display through the middle of September.

a contemporary procession