Abstract
The Golden Legend’s life of Gregory demonstrates how the story of Trajan’s salvation is really two stories, the episode of the emperor and the widow and the historically distinct and distant intervention of the pope. The pairing dates from the earliest life of Gregory and recurs in almost every later version of the story, and this ongoing concern for recording a particular, evocative instance of Trajan’s righteous dealings rather than some generalized reputation for justice and truth is striking for the way it creates a balance in the tale between Gregory’s act and Trajan’s, in which the former’s act of pity echoes the latter’s act of justice.1 Nancy Vickers, writing about Dante’s use of the Trajan story in the Purgatorio, describes how Trajan’s function is thus doubled: “[O]n one level, the emperor, acting like God, hears and answers the importunate request of the widow; and on another, God, acting like God, hears and answers the importunate request on Gregory’s behalf.”2
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Notes
See Introduction, n.15 above, and Gordon Whatley, “The Uses of Hagiography: The Legend of Pope Gregory and the Emperor Trajan in the Middle Ages,” Viator 15 (1984): 27–29.
Nancy Vickers, “Seeing Is Believing: Gregory, Trajan, and Dante’s Art,” Dante Studies 101 (1983): 74.
Frank Grady, “Piers Plowman, St. Erkenwald, and the Rule of Exceptional Salvations,” YLS 6 (1992): 61–86.
Ranulph Higden, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis, ed. J.R. Lumby, 9 vols., Rolls Series 41 (London: Longman and Co., 1865–86), 5:5. Higden cites “Helymandus” (i.e., Helinand of Froidmont, one of Vincent of Beauvais’s sources) for his Trajan material; according to Bunt (1986, 139n10), he may have taken it directly from Vincent, who also cites Helinand at X.46. Helinand’s Trajan material is now lost. Vincent does not mention Trajan’s salvation there but in X.48, where he also quotes Eutropius on the “golden rule” stanza. Another Middle English text that cites Helinandus also places the widow story and the miraculous salvation in different chapters; this is the fifteenth-century Alphabet of Tales, a translation of the Dominican Alphabetum narrationum (ca. 1300?), which tells two versions of the widow story (CCCCX, “Iudex bonus…”; CCCCXIX, “Iustitia…”) and later provides a condensed account of Gregory’s intervention (DXCII, “Oracione reuocatur ab inferis dampnatus”). See
Mary Macleod Banks, ed., An Alphabet of Tales, EETS o.s. 126–27 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1904–5), 2.281–82, 287, 393.
Higden, Polychronicon, 5:7. Trevisa refrains from editorializing when the topic comes up again in book 5: “mynde of þat myracle of þe deliveraunce of Traianus at þe sepulcre of þe apostles in þe citee of Rome, by þe grete Gregorie pope, is i-holde, as everich ʒere holy chirche makeþ mynde” (Higden, Poly-chronicon, 6:197). Higden does not supply a date for this annual observance, whose source may be a mistranslated or misremembered passage in Gerald of Wales’s Liber de principis instructione, dist. I c.xviii (which Higden cites as c. xvii), describing an instance of secular commemoration; see Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J.S. Brewer, J.F. Dimoch, and G.F. Warner, 8 vols., Rolls Series 21(London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, et al., 1861–91), 8:16–17, 82–84.
On the mid-century “Pelagian controversy,” see Gordon Leff, Bradwardine and the Pelagians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). On Uhtred see
Marcett, Uhtred de Boldon, Friar William Jordan, and Piers Plowman (New York: privately printed, 1938)
M.D. Knowles, “The Censured Opinions of Uhtred of Boldon,” PBA 37 (1951): 305–42; and
G.H. Russell, “The Salvation of the Heathen: The Exploration of a Theme in Piers Plowman,” JWCI 129 (1966): 101–16. For Hilton, see
Watson, “Visions of Inclusion: Universal Salvation and Vernacular Theology in Pre-Reformation England,” JMEMS 27 (1997): 146–48 (my source for the phrase “deviant views of redemption”), and
AJ. Minnis, “Looking for a Sign: The Quest for Nominalism in Chaucer and Langland,” in Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow, ed. Minnis, Charlotte C. Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 142–44.
R.W Chambers, “Long Will, Dante, and the Righteous Heathen,” Essays and Studies IX (1923): 76.
Critics asserting Langland’s general Augustinianism include Elizabeth Doxsee, “ ‘Trew Treuth’ and Canon Law: The Orthodoxy of Trajan’s Salvation in Piers Plowman C-Text,” Neuphilologische mitteilungen 89 (1988): 295–311
Denise Baker, “From Plowing to Penitence: Piers Plowman and Fourteenth-Century Theology,” Speculum 55 (1980): 715–25
Rosemary Woolf, “The Tearing of the Pardon,” in Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches, ed. S.S. Hussey (London: Methuen, 1969): 50–75. The liberal side includes Marcett, Uhtred de Boldon; Russell, “Salvation of the Heathen”; Watson, “Visions of Inclusion”; Coleman, Piers Plowman and the Moderni (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1981)
Robert Adams, “Piers’s Pardon and Langland’s Semi-Pelagianism,” Traditio 39 (1983): 367–418
Pamela Gradon, “Trajanus Redivivus Another Look at Trajan in Piers Plowman,” in Middle English Studies Presented to Norman Davis in Honour of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Douglas Gray and E.G. Stanley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983): 93–114
Gordon Whatley, “Piers Plowman B 12.277–94: Notes on Language, Text, Theology,” Modern Philology 82 (1984): 1–12
R.F. Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 368–76. Cindy L. Vitto, in “The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 79 (1989), stakes out an uncontroversial middle ground, concluding that “[Piers and St. Erkenwald] nicely balance each other on the issue of grace (or baptism) vs. works: neither alone will suffice for salvation” (p. 89).
Robert Adams, “Langland’s Theology,” in A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), esp. pp. 95–98.
R. W Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind (London: J. Cape, 1939), p. 148. Cf. also his remark in “Long Will” (53) on the pardon scene:“When the priest, representing current ideas, refuses to accept it, the poet is brought up against the contrast which he feels so bitterly, between his own sense of justice, and that which seems to him to prevail in the current practice of the church.”
Lee Patterson, “Historical Criticism and the Development of Chaucer Studies,” in his Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 3–39. It should be noted that critics writing about Trajan have tended to cite more widely from scholastic theology than from the patristic sources preferred by Robertson and Huppé, a habit they share with later practitioners of exeget-ical criticism; see Anne Middleton, “Introduction: The Critical Heritage,” in A Companion to Piers Plowman, pp. 17–18.
“…one could point to the sudden appearance of St. Paul in Chaucer’s’ second Nun’s Tale,’ momentarily present (literally, presented) to deliver a text from Ephesians, and to similar moments in Piers Plowman, in which an authority figure, like Piers himself or Trajan, abruptly materializes to deliver a brief text. In all instances the text could simply have been quoted or cited, but for the medieval reader or visualizer, there was an obvious (and perhaps ancient) satisfaction and mnemonic clarity in having it literally ‘represented’ and orally delivered.” Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 104.
Joseph Wittig surveys the various opinions in his “ ‘Piers Plowman’ B, Passus IX–XII: Elements in the Design of the Inward Journey,” Traditio 28 (1972): 255 n. 143. James Simpson (Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text [London: Longmans, 1990], p. 127) argues that Trajan’s speech extends to line 317, giving him over 150 lines; Kane and Donaldson’s edition attribute a mere 15 lines to Trajan.
Wittig, “Elements,” p. 280. On the cognitive structure of the dream, see also Simpson, Piers Plowman, pp. 91–107. On the signature passages in the poem and in this vision, see Anne Middleton, “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name’: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 15–82.
This observation presumes the canonical but by no means universal understanding of the poem’s composition history, A to B to C; see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Piers Plowman,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 520; and Grady, “Chaucer Reading Langland: The House of Fame,” SAC 18 (1996), pp. 13–14. The importance of the virtuous pagan in linking one phase of the poem to the next offers an interesting analogy to Mandeville’s Travels, where Sir John’s conversation with the Sultan marks the point of connection between the texts’ two main sources, Boldensele’s Itinerarius and Odoric’s Relatio. See chapter 2.
Anne Middleton, “Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman,” in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W Bloomfield, ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), pp.91–122, 280–83.
The consideration at the end of passus 10 of hard cases like Mary Magdalene and the good thief does not specifically introduce the issue on the salvation of non-Christians; they are instances of counterintuitive salvations, not exceptional ones. On Langland and the Jews, and specifically his evolving account of the relationship of Judaism to Christianity, see Elisa Narin van Court, “The Hermeneutics of Supersession: The Revisions of the Jews from the B to the C text of Piers Plowman,” YLS 10 (1996): 43–88.
On Dante’s Cato, and the salvation of the heathen in The Divine Comedy generally, see Kenelm Foster, The Two Dantes and other studies (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977)
David Foster, “Dante’s Virtuous Pagans,” Dante Studies 96 (1973): 145–62
Gino Rizzo, “Dante and the Virtuous Pagans,” in A Dante Symposium, in Commemoration of the 700th Anniversary of the Poet’s Birth (1265–1965), ed. William De Sua and Gino Rizzo, University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 58 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), pp. 115–40.
On the faculty represented by Imaginatif see Minnis, “Langland’s Ymaginatif and late-medieval theories of the imagination,” Comparative Criticism 3 (1981): 71–103, and more recently
Ralph Hanna III,“Langland’sYmaginatif: Images and the Limits of Poetry,” in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 81–94.
Whatley’s “Piers Plowman” provides a valuable survey of earlier work; see also Doxsee,“Trew Treuth”; Minnis,“Looking for a Sign,”pp. 151–56; and Grady, “Rule,” pp. 71–75. For the history of the “facere” ethic, see Obermann, “Facientibus quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam Robert Holcot, O.P., and the Beginning of Luther’s Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 55 (1962): 317–42. An interesting contemporary observation on this passage appears in the margin of MS Douce 104 (a C-text), where an annotator has written “nota of iiii follyng[gis]”—an additional piece of evidence favoring Whatley’s contention (pp. 7–8) that the “Ac” at the beginning of line 287 indicates a move to a fourth kind of baptism. For the annotation see Kerby-Fulton and Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader, p. 187.
Whatley, “Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in Its Legendary Context,” Speculum 61 (1986): 330–63, here p. 333. The poem, Whatley claims, is “an attempt to reinvest the legend with the hagiographical spirit of its earliest versions. Far from echoing the ideas of Langland’s Trajan, the St. Erkenwald poet is utterly at odds with him and with everything he represents” (342). But cf. Ruth Morse, who in her edition of the poem (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1975) argues that Erkenwald “tells the story of the righteous heathen in a way that implies certain liberal theological interpretations of Good Works and their claim upon God’s mercy” (8). All quotations are from Clifford Peterson’s edition of the poem, St. Erkenwald (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977). For the date of St. Erkenwald, generally assumed to be later than the B-text of Piers, see note 64 later.
Paradiso 19.77–78, 79–81, from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Paradiso trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 1:212–15.
Jim Rhodes, in a fine close reading of the last section of the poem, takes this notion of stage management yet further by suggesting that the miraculous salvation “cuts off dialogue prematurely,” silencing the pagan “at a moment when he has leveled his most devastating remarks…at the very doctrine that purportedly has saved him, and at a point when he has exerted his most profound effect on the audience, having moved them all to tears.” This observation may point us to the true nature of Erkenwald’s “conservatism,” which could be said to lie not in its sacramental theology but in its willingness to use the sacrament in the service of an exceptional salvation; we know from Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, for example, how effectively the spurious harmony of a happy ending can terminate a threat to the ideological status quo. See Rhodes, Poetry Does Theology: Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl Poet (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2001), pp. 157–58, and also 163–65.
They are, of course, looking in the wrong place, searching regal chronicles rather than legal records. T. McAlindon (“Hagiography into Art: A Study of St. Erkenwald,” Studies in Philology 67 [1970]: 338) points out that most English legends involving uncorrupted bodies of saints did feature kings, Bede’s St. Cuthbert being a notable exception. For a sophisticated account of the poem’s meditation on death and the labor of memory, see
D. Vance Smith, “Crypt and Decryption: Erkenwald Terminable and Interminable,” NML 5 (2002): 59–85.
On this topic see Ruth Nisse, “ ‘A Coroun Ful Riche’:The Rule of History in St. Erkenwald,” ELH 65 (1998): 277–95.
For the solution to Conscience’s riddle in Piers, see Andrew Galloway, “The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late-Medieval England: The ‘Oxford’ Riddles, the Secretum philosophorum, and the Riddles in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 70 (1995): 68–105, esp. pp. 86–90. Galloway’s convincing argument that Conscience’s “þe myddel of a Moone” refers to a Latin riddle whose solution is cor, that is, a conversion or transformation of the human heart, suggests that the pagan judge’s line “Als ferforthe as my faithe confourmyd my hert” represents another allusion to Piers Plowman, and an extremely sophisticated one (maybe one too sophisticated to be likely).
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© 2005 Frank Grady
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Grady, F. (2005). The Trouble With Trajan. In: Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12367-1_2
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