Abstract
The fiscal and sexual fantasies articulated in the anonymous Squire of Low Degree seem extravagant, even by the standards of romance. A penniless squire of unknown origins ends up marrying the daughter of the King of Hungary. Equally unexpected is the daughter’s seven-year romance with a corpse, a love that is decidedly unproductive in terms of the heterosexual economy. In this chapter, I explore the links between these fiscal and sexual economies in the world of the romance. While the text seems to perpetuate certain fantasies of wealth and jouissance, in the end it demonstrates the limits of money’s ability to translate into social success and sexual freedom. The Squire of Low Degree is framed by a necropolitics that affirms, rather than questions, the importance of patriarchal structures and calls into question money’s potentially transformative effects.
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- 1.
All quotations from The Squire of Low Degree are cited parenthetically and are from the edition of the romance in Sentimental and Humorous Romances, ed. Erik Kooper (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS Middle English Texts Series, 2005), 127–69. Dating of the poem is difficult given the lack of manuscript evidence. There are two printed editions. The only complete text, the Copland edition, was printed around 1560. Two fragments, of 60 and 120 lines respectively, survive from Wynkyn de Worde’s 1520 printing. In addition, there is a severely truncated version preserved in the Percy Folio Manuscript (c. 1650). Based on vocabulary, William Edward Mead dated the poem to 1450 in his 1904 Ginn and Company edition (lxxvi), and John Edwin Wells followed suit in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916), 149. In an updated version of the manual, edited by J. Burke Severs, Lillian Herlands Hornstein offers a later date of c. 1500 (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967), 157. Both A. C. Spearing and Myra Seaman have also advanced a later date of composition, arguing that the poem’s seeming promotion of social mobility is more in keeping with Tudor sensibilities than it is with those of the late Middle Ages. See A. C. Spearing, “Secrecy, Listening, and Telling in The Squyr of Lowe Degre,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20, no. 2 (1990): 273–92; and Myra J. Seaman, “The Waning of Middle English Chivalric Romance in ‘The Squyr of Lowe Degre’,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 29 (2004): 176. For a summary of the poem’s editions and the questions surrounding its dating, see Erik Kooper’s introduction, 127–8.
- 2.
It is intriguing to consider that despite the fact that the Percy Folio version of The Squire of Lowe Degree is only 170 lines, the author felt the need to explain the squire’s presence in Hungary:Verse
Verse It was a squier of England borne, He wrought a forffett against the crowne, Against the crowne and against the fee; In England tarry no longer durst hee (lines 1–4, p. 173 in Kooper’s edition)
The squire’s forfeiture of his property and his flight from England explain his poverty and possibly his lack of social status; these events also insinuate a shadowy history that not only clouds his past, but may point to his current motivations for pursuing the king’s daughter. The Treason Act, passed by the English parliament in 1352, outlined seven categories of treason. As one might imagine, some of these categories have to do with violence, such as murdering the king, his queen, or his eldest son (1); or the king’s representatives, including the chancellor, treasurer, or judges conducting royal business (7). These categories also included what we might think of as property crimes: economic ones, such as counterfeiting the Privy or Great Seal or counterfeiting royal money (5); or knowingly bringing counterfeit money into the realm (6); and libidinal ones, such as violating the queen, the king’s eldest unmarried daughter, or the wife of the king’s eldest son (2). See Frank W. Harris, “The Law and Economics of High Treason in England from Its Feudal Origin to the Early Seventeenth Century,” Valparaiso University Law Review 22, no. 1 (fall 1987): 81–108, especially 87–9. Which (if any) of these crimes—or combination of crimes—might have led to the squire’s exile? And might they be motivating his behavior once again? The squire seems acutely aware of the danger of pursuing the king’s unmarried daughter, telling the princess he has remained silent about his desire because “Ye might have bewraied me to the kinge, / And brought me sone to my endynge” (lines 125–6). The king of Hungary also notes the potential treason in the squire having sex with his daughter, which he sees as a crime both against the realm and against his household. This is an issue I will return to later in this chapter.
- 3.
See, for example, lines 118, 251–6, 273–4, and 883. The importance of money is also suggested by the squire’s lament, which begins and ends with his poverty, which he views as the primary impediment to love (lines 69–72, 88–9). Kevin Kiernan observes that even the description of the squire’s shield scrambles the order of the word amor so that gold (or) comes first. See Kiernan, “‘Undo Your Door’ and the Order of Chivalry,” Studies in Philology 70, no. 4 (1973): 345–66, at 353–4.
- 4.
Thomas Wright, ed., The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968), 1.1–2, 223.
- 5.
Kiernan, “Undo Your Door.”
- 6.
Carol Fewster, Traditionality and Genre in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), 146; and Seaman, “Middle English Chivalric Romance,” 199, nt. 41.
- 7.
Spearing, “Secrecy, Listening, and Telling,” 275, 282.
- 8.
Seaman, “Middle English Chivalric Romance.”
- 9.
Nicola McDonald, “Desire Out of Order and Undo Your Door,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 34 (2012): 247–75.
- 10.
Spearing, “Secrecy, Listening, and Telling,” 276.
- 11.
Spearing, “Secrecy, Listening, and Telling,” 277–8.
- 12.
On this point, see Hollie L. S. Morgan, Beds and Chambers in Late Medieval England: Readings, Representations and Realities (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), 166. Morgan discusses The Squire of Low Degree specifically on pages 167–9.
- 13.
Bryan Rivers observes that the phrase undo your door appears in both The Avowing of Arthur and Le Bone Florence of Rome, and in the case of the latter romance, it is in the context of attempted sexual assault. See “The Focus of Satire in The Squire of Low Degree ,” English Studies in Canada 7, no. 4 (December 1981): 379–87, at 379, nt. 4. On the sexual implications of opening one’s chamber in the romance, see also McDonald, “Desire Out of Order,” 259–60. McDonald notes that Undo Your Door is the title found on the title page of the earliest editions of the romance and is listed in the day book of the Oxford bookseller John Dorne (249). Kiernan also discusses the romance’s original title, arguing that modern editors drop it because it seems inappropriate for a romance. However, he finds the title appropriate for a romance that is meant to be read humorously, rather than seriously. See Kiernan, “Undo Your Door,” 345.
- 14.
It is worth considering precisely what the king is saying in these lines: While he may not trust his daughter to keep closed her “chamber,” he trusts that the squire would not enter, even if the door is open. There is some irony, of course, in the fact that it is the daughter who refuses to open her chamber, at least the second time. However, if the reader is supposed to consider the chamber already opened, through the window—and the father knows it—that breach has already been made, a point I will return to later in this chapter.
- 15.
On this point, see nt. 2.
- 16.
The quotation is a translation from Libro llamado instrucion de la muger christiana, cited in Edward Anthony Polanco, “‘The Chamber of Your Virginity Does Not Have a Price’: The Scientific Construction of the Hymen as an Indicator of Sexual Initiation in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” Footnotes: A Journal of History 1 (2017): 67–88, at 67.
- 17.
McDonald, “Desire Out of Order,” 252. The quotation is from Lee C. Ramsey, Chivalric Romances: Popular Literature in Medieval England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 197.
- 18.
Linda K. Neiberg, “Exquisite Corpses: Fantasies of Necrophilia in Early Modern English Drama” (PhD diss., Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2014), CUNY Academic Works, https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1420/ (accessed December 20, 2018).
- 19.
Bruce W. Holsinger, “Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, 243–74, at 246 (New York: Routledge, 1996).
- 20.
Georges Bataille’s interest in the corpse spans his oeuvre, from The Solar Anus, published in 1927, to Erotism: Death and Sensuality, first published in 1957. For a useful analysis of the ways in which Bataille revalorizes the corpse and its symbolic value in counterpoint to modernists like Schnitzler, Benjamin, and Fromm, see Shane Weller, “Decomposition: Georges Bataille and the Language of Necrophilia,” in Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature After Sexology, ed. Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller, 169–94, esp. 169–78 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Although Georges Bataille focuses on the alienating effects of modernity, his explorations of abjection and the sacred are deeply informed by his training as a medievalist at the École Nationale des Chartes, his work as an archivist at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and his interest in the broken and leaky bodies of saints and mystics. For a discussion of the influence of the Middle Ages on Bataille’s thinking, see Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 26–56.
- 21.
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1986 [orig. English pub. 1962]), 16.
- 22.
Weller, “Decomposition,” 174.
- 23.
Valeria Finucci, “Thinking Through Death: The Politics of the Corpse,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45, no. 1 (January 2015): 1–6, at 2–3.
- 24.
Seaman, “Middle English Chivalric Romance,” 185.
- 25.
Over the years, scholars have offered various explanations for this seemingly inscrutable return. Kevin Kiernan suggests the scene is to be read humorously, as a sign of parody. See Kiernan, “Undo Your Door,” 306. Glenn Wright reads it as an example of the motif of the jealous husband returning, unannounced, to see what his wife has been up to while he is away. See 28–9, nt. 39, in “Other Wyse Then Must We Do: Parody and Popular Narrative in The Squyr of Lowe Degre,” Comitatus 27, no. 1 (1996): 14–41. Bryan Rivers posits a potentially darker motive. He notes that the squire tells the princess he is under attack and needs entry into her chamber before the steward even arrives. He might return with the goal of gaining access—possibly forced—to the princess. See Rivers, “The Focus of Satire,” 382.
- 26.
Erik Kooper, introduction to The Squire of Low Degree , in Sentimental and Humorous Romances, ed. Erik Kooper (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS Middle English Texts Series, 2005), 127–34, at 130.
- 27.
Much like the squire’s return to the court, scholars have offered various explanations for the king’s sudden attraction. Huston Diehl suggests that the squire is a type of Christ figure and that the king and those in the court are drawn to the squire’s humble service. See “‘For No Theves Shall Come Thereto’: Symbolic Detail in the Squyr of Lowe Degree,” American Benedictine Review 32, no. 2 (June 1981): 140–55, at 147. Carol Fewster observes that the device of a hero or heroine falling in love at a feast is a staple of medieval romance, but in having the king fall in love, there is an unexpected dislocation between subject and language. See Traditionality and Genre, 130. Nicola McDonald argues that in the king’s attraction, we see a form of desire that, much like the daughter’s desire for the corpse, cannot be easily accommodated in medieval romance. See “Desire Out of Order,” 258–9. Glenn Wright suggests that the king’s gaze feminizes the squire. See “Other Wyse Then Must We Do,” 23. However, as Richard E. Zeikowitz notes, being the object of the male gaze in chivalric circles does not necessarily feminize either the man being gazed upon or the looker himself. See Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 85–100.
- 28.
Spearing, “Secrecy, Listening, and Telling,” 284.
- 29.
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40, at 12.
- 30.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–11.
- 31.
Stephen Knight, “The Social Function of the Middle English Romances,” in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. David Aers, 99–122, at 101 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986). A number of scholars have noted that despite its widening audience, Middle English romance is a conservative genre that reflects upper-class interests and ideologies. See, for example, Harriet Hudson, “Middle English Popular Romances: The Manuscript Evidence,” Manuscripta 28, no. 2 (July 1984): 67–78; Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 175–80; Helen Cooper, “Romance After 1400,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace, 690–719, at 690 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Jane Gilbert’s introduction to The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, 15–38, at 22 (London: Routledge, 2013).
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Cady, D. (2019). Necrophilia, Necropolitics, and the Economy of Desire in the Squire of Low Degree. In: The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26261-7_3
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