Loving the neighbor: Difference, desire, and aggression in the romance of late medieval England and Castile

378 Pages·2013·4.48 MB·English

by  Emily Houlik-Ritchey

LOVING THE NEIGHBOR: DIFFERENCE, DESIRE, AND AGGRESSION IN THE
ROMANCE OF LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND AND CASTILE
Emily Houlik-Ritchey
Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Department of English of the College of Arts and Sciences
Indiana University
June 2013
UMI Number: 3587665
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Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Doctoral Committee

Patricia Clare Ingham, Ph.D.

Karma Lochrie, Ph.D.

Judith H. Anderson, Ph.D.

Steven Wagschal, Ph.D.

May 2, 2013
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Copyright © 2013
Emily Houlik-Ritchey
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For Andy, Henry, and Rosie, with love.
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Acknowledgements

The help and support of many people made this dissertation possible. First and foremost,
I thank my committee, without whose vision this project would not have grown into its
present shape: Patricia Clare Ingham, Karma Lochrie, Judith H. Anderson, and Steven
Wagschal. You have been unfailingly generous with your time and feedback. I am
grateful to Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences for a Dissertation
Fellowship that supported my writing during the 2011-12 academic year, to Irven
Resnick and the National Endowment for the Humanities for my participation in a
summer teaching institute in Oxford, UK in 2010 that transformed Chapter Four, and to
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding in support of their Summer Institute in
Spanish Paleography led by Carla Rahn Phillips at the Huntington Library in 2009. I
remain indebted to the Pierpont Morgan Library, for their assistance in granting me
access to a microfilm copy of the text under consideration in Chapter Six. I would also
like to thank Shannon Gayk, Ellen MacKay, and the other faculty and graduate students
of the Early English Literature and Culture reading group at Indiana University, for their
feedback on various chapter drafts. To my dissertation writing group, Erin Elizabeth
Sweany, Cynthia Anne Rogers, and A. Arwen Taylor, I remain deeply indebted for the
energy, insight, and enthusiasm with which you workshopped each chapter. For their
valuable assistance with Spanish translations, I thank Victor Rodríguez-Pereira and
Steven Wagschal; for her precise copy-editing, I thank A. Arwen Taylor; and for her
cheerful competence and expert assistance on all matters administrative and
departmental, I thank Bev Hankins. To all my family and friends, who assisted me in
innumerable tangible and intangible ways, thank you.
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Emily Houlik-Ritchey

LOVING THE NEIGHBOR: DIFFERENCE, DESIRE, AND AGGRESSION IN THE
ROMANCE OF LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND AND CASTILE

“Loving the Neighbor” assesses the ethics of difference in the shared romance narratives of late
medieval England and Castile (1360-1450). It appraises the ethics informing portrayals of
community across differences of religion, race, gender, and history. To this end, “Loving the
Neighbor” analyzes late-medieval English and Castilian romances as they engage the Judeo-
Christian ethical demand to love the neighbor as the self. Weaving together familiar and
understudied geographies, languages, and texts, it analyzes desire and aggression as attributes of
neighbor relations. Via the theoretical category of the neighbor, the dissertation argues that
fantasies of difference, such as the Saracen and Jew, function to illuminate medieval Christians’
anxieties over their ethical injunction to love their neighbors as themselves. The Castilian context
is especially relevant to this work, given a centuries-long medieval history of convivencia (living
together): the flourishing of Judaism and Islam alongside, but also in conflict and competition
with, Christianity. This project delves into both the historical archive and contemporary
psychoanalytic theory to assess the oscillating fantasies of mutual regard, reluctant acceptance,
and violent aggression among Christian, Saracen, and Jew in late-medieval romance, and to
broaden our understanding of ethical dilemmas pervasive in late-medieval literatures.

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION pg. 1

PART I: THE ETHICS OF HISTORY

Chapter One
Return to Pedro: The Contested Ethics of Pero López de Ayala pg. 25

Chapter Two
Pedro Betrayed: Unlikely Neighbors in Ayala’s Coronica del rey pg. 66
don Pedro and Chaucer’s The Monk’s Tale

PART II: INTIMATE DIFFERENCES

Chapter Three
The Constancy of Rome: John Gower’s and Juan de Cuenca’s pg. 103
Christian-Pagan Ethics

Chapter Four
The Unbearable Jewish Difference at the Heart of Christian Ethics pg. 174

PART III: NEIGHBORING SPAYNE

Chapter Five
Conversion, Betrayal: Charlemagne’s Neighbors in The Sowdon pg. 231
of Babylon

Chapter Six
Fierabras’s Dilemma: Conversion, Death, and Love in La Hystoria pg. 296
del emperador Carlomagno

EPILOGUE: ROMANCE AND ETHICS pg. 352

BIBLIOGRAPHY pg. 355
1

INTRODUCTION
Chaucer’s Plowman, like his brother the Parson, is a good man. Chaucer asserts this
character judgment in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales through the Plowman’s
observance of the two greatest commandments of Christianity: “God loved he best with al his
hole herte / […] And thane his neighebor right as hymselve” (General Prologue 533-535). Love
of the neighbor constitutes the ethical core of Christianity. Adherence to this central Christian
mandate establishes the Plowman’s idealized ethical standing among the Canterbury pilgrims,
though he tells no tale and we know very little else about him. The Plowman seems not to feel the
compulsion of the young man of law (who converses with Jesus on the subject in the Gospel of
Luke) to ask, “And who is my neighbor?”1 Nor does the Plowman seem to harbor any doubts
about how to put this commandment to love the neighbor into practice. Yet the ethical
complexities of these two questions, “Who is my neighbor?” and “What does it mean to love my
neighbor?”, preoccupies medieval and modern thinkers alike, including Chaucer. One has only to
consider the totalizing religious violence against the Jews of The Prioress’s Tale or the cruelty of
Custance’s mothers-in-law in The Man of Law’s Tale to realize that Chaucer understands the
encounter with one’s neighbors—how to account for them, as well as how to love them—to
become a much more difficult proposition in The Canterbury Tales than his Plowman initially
makes it seem. And as both of these troubling tales make clear, the ethical treatment of one’s
neighbors is inextricably bound up with the problem of violence within one’s family/community
as well as outside it.2
Late-medieval literary exploration of ethical complexities is not unique to Chaucer.
Diverse genres, including epic, hagiography, chronicle, romance, travel narrative, exempla, and

1 Luke 10:29. This question comes during the larger episode of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan,
found at Luke 10:25-37.
2 For instance, the Man of Law’s joint invocation/denial of the incest-plot common to the story of
Constance in its other redactions, and, in The Prioress’s Tale, the threats of violence from the Christian
community of schoolmasters against the little clergion, for the same singing that enrages the Jews.
2

drama, take encounters with difference (cultural, religious, racial, gender, or historical) as their
subject matter. This dissertation asks how such diverse medieval literary texts employ the Judeo-
Christian mandate to love the neighbor. How are we to understand deliberative ethical acts when
they are represented in fictionalized histories or imaginative romance, and amidst the chaotic and
complex scenarios of war, or violence, or love? In my pursuit of the questions raised by a literary
ethics—that is, the purchase medieval literature makes on ethics via its representations of
difference—I will be taking us into neighboring territory, generically, textually, and
geographically. The shared narrative traditions of late medieval England and Castile, in which the
demands of romance and history merge, form the archive for this project. From Chaucer’s
historical interest in the disputed sovereignty of medieval Castile in The Monk’s Tale to the
psychological dilemmas of converted Saracens in popular European romance, I trace here an
ethical impulse legible across late medieval romance/history. Such literature, I will show, is
deeply interested in both the potentials and the problems of the ethical mandate to love the
neighbor.
To elucidate late-medieval romance’s ethical impulse, I propose here a mode of reading
literary representations of difference through the psychoanalytic concept of the neighbor. For
Freud, to encounter the neighbor is to encounter an ethical crisis. The neighbor (Freud’s
Nebenmensch, the “next man”) brings to the fore the tension between ethical responsibility and
ambivalent relationships. As the above gloss of Nebenmensch implies, the neighbor is not a
particular individual, but anyone who happens to step into this ethical position. As such, the
encounter with the neighbor is characterized by contingency: it is arbitrary, accidental, and
transient. Our ethical responsibility to this neighbor does not diminish due to the transience and
unpredictability of the moment in which we are in contact. And it is precisely the unknown
quality of the neighbor that raises difficulties. The dilemma that one cannot fathom the neighbor’s
desires and intentions problematizes the Judeo-Christian law to love one’s neighbors, as Freud
illustrates in Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud’s ruminations on this ethical injunction reveal