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The Poetics of Enshrinement

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Abstract

As the phylactery and umbilicus statue suggested in the last chapter, the physical features of the medieval reliquary often drew attention to and commented upon its representational strategies. Reading other such devotional objects, as well as the cultural traditions informing them, can help us to elaborate further on the reliquary’s inscriptional and performative strategies, and ultimately to establish an artifact-based language about representation. As Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess will demonstrate, the ways that inscription and performance enshrine each other in the reliquary provide a formal mechanism for understanding the representational strategies of poetic language. The Book of the Duchess provides an initiating instance of the poetics of enshrinement at work.

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Notes

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  38. In his commentary on Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs, Geoffrey Hartman calls inscription “any verse conscious of the place on which it was written.” Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 32. Although this notion of the “conscious[ness]” of verse is a particularly Romantic and post-Romantic one, the idea that writing associated with commemoration contains within itself a meeting point between language and the material world is useful for thinking about the nature of an object such as the “A” reliquary.

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  39. Vance, “Style and Value,” 90. He refers to the line “Les colps Rollant conut en treis perruns” (1. 2875); I have cited Frederick Goldin’s translation of lines 2874–75 (The Song of Roland, trans. Frederick Goldin [New York: W.W. Norton, 1978], p. 132).

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  48. John Ganim, ChaucerianTheatricality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 4–5, 34, 41, and 93. Ganim also makes the important point, relevant to the present study, that although the prevailing critical metaphor in Chaucer studies was for a long time Gothic art and architecture, the theatrical metaphor can encompass both “artifact and performance” (5).

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  50. We might turn to a later play tradition to reinforce some of these points, because some aspects of early modern theater actually illuminate a semiotics of medieval drama capable of being only implied during the Middle Ages themselves. Drama’s tendency to be self-referential about its own representational practices became increasingly explicit after certain reformist measures had come to pass. One of John Bale’s lost plays deals with the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, and the existence of such a play demonstrates with particular clarity the possibilities for performance to critique its own representational systems. If, as has been speculated, this play contained a critical portrayal of Becket’s own scene of martyrdom, then such a play would have been making an argument about the role of performance aesthetics themselves in the constitution of the shrine’s authenticity, what Peter Roberts refers to as the “theatrical nature of the cult” (see Roberts, “Politics, Drama, and the Cult of Thomas Becket,” in Pilgrimage: The English Experience, pp. 225–26 [199–237]). More specifically, the pageant of Saint Thomas called attention to his miraculous blood and other relics (it took place on the eve of the Translation of the Relics into the 1530s), and so in this way as well a play critiquing the cult might have found at its center a relic whose meaning was constituted by the conventions of spectacle and audience interaction. At this stage the play could become a means of critiquing the authenticity of the relics, their status as signs, because dramatic expression had already established itself as a vehicle for discourse on the structure of the object’s connection to its mimetic representation.

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  54. O’Keeffe, Visible Song, p. 22. See also her discussion of Isidore of Seville’s perception of pointing and punctuation as a “visual phenomenon” (pp. 145–46).

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  58. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “Introduction,” in TheMindsEye, pp. 4–5 [3–10]. In a later essay in this volume, Hamburger raises the specific issue of inscriptions on devotional objects, but then returns to his focus on iconography, arguing that “for all their recourse to the word, however, medieval images have something to say over and against the texts that claim to speak for them” (Hamburger, “The Medieval Work of Art,” in TheMindsEye, p. 376). His refusal to privilege textual over visual expression provides an important model for this study.

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  59. “The image is not the reflection of some external view of the world but the beginning and foundation of a process of thought.” See Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 216 [197–223].

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  62. Ann R. Meyer makes a related claim that architectural forms exerted an influence on literary productions in the late Middle Ages in Meyer, Medieval Allegory, p. 158. While she sees these artistic manifestations as “respon[ding]” to each other, and in particular the text as the “poetic

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  63. descendant” of the architectural construction (p. 140), the present study instead makes the case that the visual provides a language for articulating a process occurring in the verbal realm.

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  64. On the late-medieval “incarnational aesthetic,” see Gibson, Theater of Devotion, pp. 1–18.

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  66. Chap. 3’s perspective on a play text as performed poetic occasion will elaborate further on this point.

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  84. Chap. 4, which discusses the dream vision Pearl, will elaborate on the potential of dream visions, as well as visionary literature more generally, to accommodate what poetic language as performative brings into being.

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  85. On dreaming’s role in language’s ability to create new realities, and on the ways that dreaming and language complicate the meaning of visuality, see Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p. 34. As Scarry explains, both dreaming (daydreaming, in her instance) and literary language “bring into being things not previously existing in the world.” But they differ in that the “verbal arts” also attempt to replace the “faintness” of dream vision with the “solidity…of the perceptible world.” In this difference, we can

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© 2008 Seeta Chaganti

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Chaganti, S. (2008). The Poetics of Enshrinement. In: The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615380_2

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