Avatars of Ugliness in Medieval LiteratureAuthor(s): Jan ZiolkowskiReviewed work(s):Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Jan., 1984), pp. 1-20Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3730321 .Accessed: 06/11/2011 09:42

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JANUARY I984 VOL. 79 PART I

AVATARS OF UGLINESS IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

Medieval poets, whether writing in Latin or Old French or Middle English, whether composing love lyrics or narrative works, lavished their efforts on formal descrip- tions of persons, particularly of young women. When singing the praises of beautiful maidens, the poets followed a rigid canon that determined not only which parts of the body and face they dwelled on and which they omitted from consideration, but also the order in which they examined these features and even the adjectives and similes that they used. This canon, in place from the twelfth century in treatises on poetics and in evidence in the verse of still earlier times, stipulated that descriptions move systematically from the head of the subject downward to the feet. In addition to a particular order of description, the canon fixed criteria for determining what was beautiful. It required that the damsel in question have long blonde hair; a smooth, white, moderate-sized forehead; delicate eyebrows, not joined above the nose; sparkling grey-blue eyes; a rosy or lily-white complexion; a well-formed, straight nose; a small mouth with full red lips and white, well-spaced teeth; a long white neck; long arms and fingers; a white bosom with hard little breasts; slender hips; and well-formed legs tapering to petite feet.1

The order of exposition and the physical characteristics dictated by the canon of beauty can be seen throughout medieval literature - in descriptions of the Virgin Mary, in secular love lyrics, in romances, and in historical poems.2 The most famous medieval examples are probably the portraits of Helen of Troy which Matthew of Vendome provides as models for students in his Ars versificatoria.3 Edmond Faral, both in his ground-breaking Les Arts poetiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siecle and elsewhere, emphasized duly how wide-reaching an influence such catalogues of charms exerted.4 D. S. Brewer, in an article on 'The Ideal of Feminine Beauty in Medieval Literature', has stressed 'the extraordinary fixity' of formal descriptions of feminine beauty.5

While the methodical enumerations of beauties have received their portion of scholarly attention,6 their constant Doppelganger - portrayals of ugliness - have

1 Walter Clyde Curry, The Middle English Ideal of Personal Beauty; As Found in the Metrical Romances, Chronicles, and Legends of the XIII, XIV, and XV Centuries (Baltimore, I916), p. 3 and passim. (Curry's book, despite its title, is helpful for understanding descriptions of ugliness.)

2 For lengthy descriptions of the Virgin Mary's beauty, see Carleton Brown, A Register of Middle English Religious and Didactic Verse, 2 vols (Oxford, 1916-20), nos 474, 800, 137, 1652, 2066, 2468, and 2469. For descriptions in romances, see Alice M. Colby, The Portrait in Twelfth-Century French Literature: An Example of the Stylistic Originality of Chretien de Troyes (Geneva, 965). For those in epic poems, see Oskar Voigt, Das Ideal der Schinheit und Hisslichkeit in den altfranzisischen chansons de geste, Inaugural Dissertation (Marburg, I891).

3 I, 56-57 (as numbered in Faral's edition, cited below in note 4). 4 Les Arts poetiques (Paris, 1924), pp. 75-8I, and Edmond Faral, 'Ovide et quelques autres sources du

roman d'Eneas', Romania, 40 (191 ), 6 -88. 5 'The Ideal of Feminine Beauty in Medieval Literature, especially "Harley Lyrics", Chaucer, and

Some Elizabethans', MLR, 50 (1955), 257-69 (p. 257). 6 The fullest treatments are, besides those of Faral and Brewer, M. B. Ogle, 'The Classical Origin and

Tradition of Literary Conceits', American Journal of Philology, 34 (1912), 125-52 (with references on pages 126 and 152 to his other articles); Hennig Brinkmann, Geschichte der lateinischen Liebesdichtung im Mittelalter (Halle, I925), pp. 88-93; Winfried Offermanns, Die Wirkung Ovids auf die literarische Sprache der lateinischen Liebesdichtung des ii. und 12. Jahrhunderts, Beiheft 3 zum Mittellateinischen Jahrbuch (Wuppertal, I970), pp. 129-56.

Ugliness in Medieval Literature

been neglected.7 Faral, though he made a few remarks on descriptions of ugliness, announced without hesitation that 'Dans la litterature, les eloges de la beaute sont infiniment plus frequents que les tableaux de la laideur' (Les Arts poetiques, p. 76). In making this assertion, Faral overstated his case, for accounts of ugliness, even if fewer than those of beauty, appear often enough in medieval literature. Indeed, they constitute a distinct tradition that deserves to be traced from its beginnings at the end of the Roman period to its weakening in the seventeenth century. In the Middle Ages, rhetorical descriptions of unsightly men and women are found in tractates, plays, romances, and - above all - lyric poetry. In late medieval English lyric poetry, the ironic description becomes a recognizable sub-genre. Apart from their inherent interest as a commonplace of medieval literature, the descriptions of ugliness shed light on how medieval rhetorical training affected approaches to composition8 and how rhetoric and ethics, now the unlikeliest of associates, spent part of the Middle Ages in each other's company.9

Classical literature contains its share of vignettes devoted to physically repulsive people and among these vignettes we might expect to find a head-to-foot study of ugliness; but such was not, in fact, the customary procedure. We look in vain for a head-to-toe exposition of the deformities of Thersites, whose ugliness Homer mentions (Iliad, II. 216-19), or Socrates, who was held to be a paradigm of ugliness. With equal disappointment we emerge from reading such outstanding characteriza- tions of unattractive women as Catullus's Poem 43 and Horace's Epode 8. Not before classical antiquity is emitting its last whimper do we meet an author who anticipates the routine medieval progression from brow to toe. The author is Sidonius Apollinaris, a fifth-century nobleman and man of letters who lived in Gaul. His censure of a parasite named Gnatho (Letters, II. 13), almost a pendant to his equally thorough encomium of the Emperor Theoderic (Letters, I. 2), provided a convenient formula for describing hideousness and must have been influential in the Middle Ages;10 after all, his works formed the basis for many other practices prescribed in medieval poetical and rhetorical treatises.11 Geoffrey ofVinsauf, the twelfth-century rhetorician who produced the Poetria nova and other handbooks on writing which were soon incorporated into the school curricula, refers repeatedly to Sidonius as a revered auctoritas.12

Matthew of Vendome, Geoffrey's one great twelfth-century predecessor in the field of versification manuals, does not mention Sidonius by name, but he does

7 The only major exceptions are: Hans RobertJauss, 'Die klassische und die christliche Rechtfertigung des Hasslichen in mittelalterlicher Literatur', first printed in Die nicht mehr schonen Kunste: Grenzphdnomene des Asthetischen, edited by Hans RobertJauss (Munich, 1968), pp. 143-68, and reprinted in Das Groteske in der Dichtung, edited by Otto F. Best (Darmstadt, 1980), pp. 143-78; Paul Michel, 'Formosa deformitas': Bewaltigungsformen des Hasslichen in mittelalterlicher Literatur (Bonn, 976).

8 See Jane Baltzell, 'Rhetorical "Amplification" and "Abbreviation" and the Structure of Medieval Narrative', Pacific Coast Philology, 2 (1967), 32-39.

9 For studies on how grammar, a field related to rhetoric, became connected with ethics, see Philippe Delhaye, 'Grammatica et Ethica au XIIe siecle', Recherches de theologie ancienne et medidvale, 25 (1958), 59-I io, and 'L'Enseignement de la philosophie morale au XIIe siecle', Medieval Studies, I I (1949), 77-99. 10 References are to Sidonius, Poems and Letters, translated by W. B. Anderson, 2 vols (London, I936-65).

The translation below is Anderson's. " Sidonius's portrait of Theoderic was a model for encomia: see Annette Georgi, Das lateinische und

deutsche Preisgedicht des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1969), pp. 32-40. 12 On Geoffrey's influence, see Karl Young, 'Chaucer and Geoffrey of Vinsauf', Modern Philology, 41 ( 943-44), 172-82. Qn Sidonius as an auctoritas, see Edmond Faral, 'Sidoine Apollinaire et la technique litteraire du Moyen Age', in Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati, ii (Citta del Vaticano, I946), pp. 567-8o.

2

JAN ZIOLKOWSKI 3

produce five grand cameos of beauty and two of ugliness. (In an uncharacteristic moment of insight into human nature, he maintains that a teacher ought to dwell less on vituperation than on praise, since men are naturally inclined to criticize rather than to laud (Ars versificatoria, I, 59).) In presenting a scoundrel named Davus, Matthew focuses not so much on the man's body as on his nefarious activities, and for this reason manuscripts entitle the piece a Descriptio senilis nequitiae and a

Vituperium stulti.13 The sketch is noteworthy for our purposes only in that, as a denunciation of a sponger, it follows on a road paved by Sidonius's caricature of Gnatho. More pertinent is the description of Beroe, which moves loosely, with occasional digressions and repetitions, from the mangy head to the gouty foot of the

reprehensible woman. As in the picture of Davus, Matthew shows no heed for

possible squeamishness on the part of his readers. He presents a woman so filthy that her ears are ridden with worms and that her eyelids act as a fly-trap for the insects which swarm around her bleary eyes (Ars versificatoria, I, 58).

Such descriptions, composed with unmistakable zest, served several purposes. In the first place, they offered writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a harmless means of continuing to produce the violently insulting personal descriptions found in earlier medieval monastic literature and possibly related to vernacular flyting traditions. Froumund of Tegernsee, a monk of the tenth century, left a rather obscure poem which illustrates how revolting the medieval Latin lampoon could be; quotation of the first thirteen lines will suffice to convey the flavour of the poem:

Quid totiens me dilaceras, cuculus sine pennis, Aequiperans te homini, testudine pigrior omni? Ecce ut spuma tumes cicius ruiturus in ignes; Qui dudum fueras, nunquam fore desine ad horas; Flegmaticus follis sis foetidus atque putredo. Versificum carmen fingis te ponere stilo: Nugula verba facis, discis que nescio de quo: Si vis, certemus faciendo carmine versus. Huc, rogo, verte oculos, demens, nec suspice nubes. Ecce prius tergenda manus, qua mungio pendet, Non potius purgandus aqua, quia pectora sordent? Si capud inclinas, vetulo de flegmate guttas, Quod tibi pigredo detersit pectore duro.14

Froumund's description does not follow the head-to-toe order that interests us here, but it may be the closest surviving relative of lost curses and invectives which did

proceed limb by limb, joint by joint, organ by organ. Head-to-toe curses survive in Latin from ancient times.15

Apart from opening an outlet for a bilious imagination, descriptions of ugliness gave students a well-earned relief from set exercises on charming ladies. That such exercises were common one may infer from the prominence of beauty descriptions in textbooks (see Faral, Les Arts poetiques, p. 76), from extant manuscripts in which students' compositions and teachers' models are sprinkled among treatises,16 and

13 See B. Haur6au, on Bibl. Vat. Reg. Christ. 344 and BN 15155, Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliotheque nationale, 29, Part 2 (i 88o), 328-29. 14 Die Tegernseer Briefsammlung (Froumund), edited by Karl Strecker (Berlin, 1925), pp. 53-54. 15 See W. Sherwood Fox, 'Cursing as a Fine Art', Sewanee Review, 27 (1919), 460-77 (pp. 467-68). 16 See Edmond Faral, 'Le Manuscrit 511 du Hunterian Museum', Studi medievali, n.s. 9 (1936), I8-12I,

and A Thirteenth-Century Anthology of Rhetorical Poems, edited by Bruce Harbert (Toronto, I975).

4 Ugliness in Medieval Literature

from the frequency of beauty catalogues in twelfth-century poetry.17 But one need not rely on inference alone: already by the end of the twelfth century rhetoricians were issuing explicit statements on how passe the tableaux of beautiful women had become. Geoffrey of Vinsauf grumbled that the 'formae descriptio' was a 'res quasi trita et vetus' (Poetria nova, 622-23).

Elsewhere in the Poetria nova Geoffrey appears to strive consciously to vary the monotonous head-to-toe description by turning it upside down; in a passage on adjectives he bids the student: 'Say therefore: snowy teeth, flaming lips, honied taste, rosy countenance, milky brow, golden hair' (Poetria nova, 773-75).18 Given the fact that even a schoolmasterly rhetorician like Geoffrey grew impatient with the fixed method of description, we should be prepared to find the convention travestied by younger, freer spirits. The Latin Middle Ages saw lively parody of many liturgical forms and literary genres.19 In the schools students were particularly eager to pervert their basic texts; to cite one amusing example, a tenth-century pupil produced a barbarous remaniement of the famous nightingale poem which is found amid the Cambridge Songs and which was formerly attributed to Fulbert of Chartres. Where the original poem begs the nightingale never to end her mellifluous song, the parody insists that she stop her screeching.20

In fact, the descriptions of feminine beauty were burlesqued as early as the twelfth century. In a poem with the incipit 'Musa iocosa veni, mihi carmina suggere vati' (a composition probably prior to Matthew of Vendome's passages on Helen and Beroe), the poet plays an elaboratejoke on the worn-out conventions of the descriptio pulchritudinis.21 The author puts his tongue in his cheek in the first two lines, as he invokes the Muse to inspire him to write an innovative poem. At first the description which follows seems anything but novel. Quite innocently and predictably, the poet moves from hair to brow, nose to lips, neck to breast, and arms to hands. At this juncture the poet begins the obligatory jump over the female genitalia by saying coyly that no one may talk about that ineffably wonderful, but unspeakably private part of the anatomy. Somehow, though, his bound falls short and in the end he touches on the taboo subject. He writes:

Sed quid dicemus de re laudabiliore Cum nequeat dici de causa nobiliore Que latet absconse casto precincta pudore Hic asstant coxe cum re peramabiliore Crura quibus subsunt, magno repleta vigore Que siquidem nullo lassantur victa labore

(11. 20-25)

Could these remarks on the athletic capability of the woman's thighs have been merely an unintentional or naive double-entendre? No. Lest we think these departures from the norms of the descriptio to have been fortuitous, the poet concludes with a line that completes the bathos: 'Cuncta pedes portant, fulgentes absque pedore' (1. 26).

17 Faral, 'Ovide . ..', Romania, 40 (191 I), I6I-88. 18 The quotation is from Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, translated by Margaret F. Nims (Toronto, 1967). Geoffrey remarks further on the need to vary descriptio in his Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi (II. 2.5, as edited by Faral, Les Arts poetiques). 19 See Paul Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter, second edition (Stuttgart, 1963). 20 Die Cambridger Lieder, edited by Karl Strecker (Berlin, 1926), pp. 29-32 and 'Anhang'. 21 The poem has been edited and translated by Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-

Lyrics, second edition, 2 vols (Oxford, 1968), nI, 450-52.

JAN ZIOLKOWSKI 5

The portrait, far from living up to its early promise of being typical, closes with a wholly incongruous observation about the cleanness of the woman's feet!

Such mischievous rearranging of the beauty descriptions was one option for poets who enjoyed writing travesties, but it was not the only one. As the centuries passed, poets grew ever more exasperated with the stale and constrictive lists (Curry, The Middle English Ideal, pp. o-I ). Now and then they vented their spleen by trans- mogrifying the lovely blondes into ugly crones and whores, the handsome knights into giants, dwarfs, and wild men. In so doing the poets exhibited the same enthusiasm for the ugly and the monstrous that medieval artists evinced, if wejudge by the bizarre marginalia in manuscripts and the grotesqueries such as gargoyles in medieval cathedrals.22 Thus the describing of ugliness liberated writers from the oppressive weight of beauty and allowed them to indulge in the medieval passion for the outlandish. One can almost hear Chretien de Troyes sigh in relief as he unveils the loathly lady in his Perceval:

onques riens si leide a devise ne fu neis dedanz anfer. Einz ne veistes si noir fer come ele ot le col et les mains, et ancores fu ce del mains a l'autre leidure qu'ele ot. Si oel estoient com dui crot, petit ausi come de rat, s'ot nes de singe ou de chat et oroilles d'asne ou de buef. Si dant resanblent moel d'uef de color, si estoient ros, et si ot barbe come bos.23

Whereas in descriptions of beauty Chretien had to adhere to the narrow set of authorized metaphors and similes, in those of ugliness he was free to invent as he wished; the comparisons had not yet been fixed.

Not all elaborate depictions of ugliness were purely for amusement or release. Besides offering an escape from the constraints of beauty, they could serve higher purposes in both literature and art.24 Descriptions of a luscious young woman and a

collapsing crone often come together in literature as an emphatic memento mori (or, to be more accurate, memento senescere). The bluntest example appears in the late medieval English Death and Liffe, in which Lady Liffe is a ravishing beauty while

Lady Death is 'the ffoulest ffreake pat formed was euer'.25 The most famous such scene in Middle-English poetry occurs in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where the contrast between the physical states of the two women reminds the reader of man's

mortality and futility, two concepts that the reader may have forgotten during the

22 On marginalia, see Lilian M. C. Randall, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley, i967). On gargoyles, see most recently Ronald Sheridan and Anne Ross, Gargoyles and Grotesques: Paganism in the Medieval Church (Boston, I975). On the grotesque in medieval art, see Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Reveils et prodiges; le gothiquefantastique (Paris, 960). On monsters, seeJohn Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 981). 23 Le Conte du Graal (Perceval), edited by Felix Lecoy, 2 vols (Paris, I979-81), I, 11. 4587-6I3. 24 On the significance of grotesques in art, see Willard Farnham, The Shakespearean Grotesque. Its Genesis

and Transformations (Oxford, I97I), pp. 1-46. 25 See Death and Liffe: A Medieval Alliterative Debate Poem in a Seventeenth-Century Version, edited by Israel

Gollancz and Mabel Day (London, 1930), 11.60-97 and I55-70 (1. I57).

Ugliness in Medieval Literature

last extensive description of a person in the poem - the arming of Gawain.26 In other instances the winsome maiden and the hideous hag are glimpses of the same woman, but at two stages in her life. In the eleventh-century Latin Ruodlieb, which has just claim to be called the first extant romance of medieval Europe, the hero's mother admonishes him on the consequences of aging by describing how a woman and how a man change physically as they grow old.27 In the Jeu de la Feuillee, Adam de la Halle recounts how his wife has lost every touch of her youthful grace. His full- length portrait won great favour with later readers and survives separately from the rest of the play in two manuscripts.28

Whereas the vignettes mentioned above serve to warn of the ineluctable old age and death that await us all, others demonstrate the consequences of low life by tracing the bodily manifestations of moral collapse.29 From the late thirteenth century survives Matheolus's Lamentationes (later translated from Latin into Old French by Jehan Le Fevre), in which the author rehearses in morbid detail the original and present appearance of the prostitute, Petra, whom he married and because of whom he lost his office as priest.30 Later (and also written by a Frenchman) is FranCois Villon's Testament, in which a section entitled 'Regrets de la Belle Heaulmiere' (11. 453-560) records the sadness of an old harlot as she compares her present unattractiveness with her former splendour.

What prompted these diptychs, with their facing panels of the sublimely beautiful and the nauseatingly repugnant? Sometimes we detect a chain of influence, in which one particular description evidently inspired imitations and reactions; Adam de la Halle's two intertwined pictures of his wife Marie perhaps led directly to Matheolus's description and indirectly to Villon's. Yet in the cases of the Ruodlieb and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we need not seek such linkage, for the notion of juxtaposing head-to-foot descriptions of the pretty and the loathsome would have suggested itself to most writers as a result of their rhetorical training. As F. J. E. Raby noted in his History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, 'Every schoolboy learned how to describe a woman's beauty, and how to write an "invective" against women' .31

The descriptions of whores, besides affording an insight into how set composition- exercises found their way into literature, bring us to the complex issue of how descriptions of a person's body and assessment of his moral state came to be bound together in medieval literature. This question has been raised but left unanswered by many literary historians, among them E. R. Curtius and D. S. Brewer.32 The

26 On the description of the two women, see Derek A. Pearsall, 'Rhetorical "Descriptio" in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', MLR, 50 (1955), 129-34 (pp. 130-3 ). 27 Fragment xv (xiv), as edited by Karl Langosch in Waltharius. Ruodlieb. Marchenepen (Darmstadt, 1956). 28 Adam le Bossu, Le Jeu de la Feuillee, edited by Ernest Langlois, second revised edition (Paris, 1970), p. ix (on the MSS) and 11. 5 I-174 (the descriptions). 29 Note that a 'good' character who turned 'bad' changed accordingly in physical appearance. See the

comments on this kind of transformation in Merlin. Roman en prose du XIIIe siicle, edited by Gaston Paris and Jacob Ulrich, 2 vols (Paris, i886), i, i66. 30 Les Lamentations de Matheolus, edited by Anton-Gerard van den Hamel, 2 vols (Paris, I892-I905), I,

11. 565-691 of Book I. See also The Pseudo-Ovidian De Vetula, edited by Dorothy M. Robathan (Amsterdam, 1968), Liber secundus, 11. 230-336 and 500-508. 31 F. J. E. Raby, A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, second edition, 2 vols (Oxford, 1957), 1, 45- 32 See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated by Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1973), p. 182, note 37, and D. S. Brewer, 'The Ideal .. .', p. 257, note I.

6

JAN ZIOLKOWSKI 7

answer demands consideration of two large fields, rhetoric and physiognomy, but will have to be restricted to two mere paragraphs here. Let me begin by evaluating the contribution of rhetoric to the 'moral description'. Although the technical term descriptio was relatively unimportant in classical rhetorical theory, personal attri- butes were important as supporting evidence, for praise or for blame, in epideictic oratory (see Pearsall, p. I29). In the late classical period epideictic oratory grew in prominence in the rhetorical schools, while forensic rhetoric became the private domain of specialists and deliberative rhetoric withered under political repression.33 As epideictic oratory rose, so did the habit of lingering over personal attributes - of describing.34 Description of physical appearance was pushed to two extremes: those men regarded favourably had to be good and handsome, while those criticized had to be bad and unattractive. Under early Christianity, this tendency in description was confirmed: external appearance was regarded as a mirror of the soul.35 Explicit statements of this theory may be found in Ambrose ('Imago quaedam animi loquitur in vultu'), in Isidore ('Vultus autem animorum qualitatem significat'), and in Rabanus Maurus ('facies autem duobus modis intelligitur, hoc est, corporea et spiritalis').36 Dorian Gray, the man whose body remains pristine as his soul turns cankered from debauchery, would have been incomprehensible in the Middle Ages.

Developments not only in late antique rhetoric, but also in ancient physiognomi- cal theories, would have encouraged writers to express qualities of personal charac- ter through description of bodily appearance. Physiognomia was in ancient times not the study of facial features, as it is today, but rather the study of how the entire body expresses the personality of the man who occupies it.37 According to the anonymous Physiognomia Latina, the goal of physiognomy is 'ex qualitate corporis qualitatem ... animi considerare atque perspicere'.38 Physiognomical treatises are a particularly likely source for the medieval descriptive technique, since in addition to emphasiz- ing the moral significance of appearance they proceed from head to foot.39 Their influence on ancient descriptive technique has long been recognized,40 and there is no reason to assume that their influence ceased suddenly in the Middle Ages.

Unlike their Greek contemporaries, the Latin rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic made no comment on either the head-to-foot method or the moral significance of descriptio,41 but the practice of writers such as Sidonius Apollinaris shows that both new developments were taking root. In depicting the Emperor Theoderic, Sidonius moves painstakingly down from the crown of the head to the feet, and he

33 See Robert W. Smith, The Art of Rhetoric in Alexandria (The Hague, 1974), p. 156. 34 On description in the Second Sophistic, see Charles Sears Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (to 400o) (New York, 1928), pp. 17-20, and Donald Lemen Clark, Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education (New York, I957), pp.201-203. 35 On Ennodius, see Hilde Vogt, Die literarische Personenschilderung des frihen Mittelalters (Leipzig and

Berlin, 1934), p. 31. 36 For full references, see Offermanns, p. 133. 37 See RolfMegow, 'Antike Physiognomielehre', Das Altertum, 9 ( 963), 2 I 3-2 (p. 215). 38 Quoted from Scriptores Physiognomici Graeci et Latini, edited by Richard Foerster, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1893),

II, 4. 39 On the head-to-foot method, see Megow, p. 217. On connexions between medieval descriptions and

physiognomic theory, see Lars Lonnroth, 'Kroppen som sjalens spegel- ett motiv i de islandska sagorna' ('The Body as Mirror of the Soul - a Motif in the Icelandic Sagas'), Lychnos ( 963-64), 24-6i (English summary on pages 59-6I). 40 See Elizabeth C. Evans, 'The Study of Physiognomy in the Second Century A.D.', Transactions of the

American Philological Association, 72 (I 94), 96- o8. 41 See Hennig Brinkmann's useful words on descriptio and ecphrasis in Zu Wesen und Form mittelalterlicher

Dichtung (Halle, 1928), pp. 57-68 (especially p. 65).

8 Ugliness in Medieval Literature

subordinates the physical description to the more general praise of the Emperor's personal integrity (see Vogt, Die literarische Personenschilderung, pp. 26-27). In the portrait of Gnatho, the fifth-century rhetorician first establishes the detestable nature of the parasite and then refutes any possible assertion that Gnatho is physically appealing; underlying the description is the conviction that a man's inward and outward states must coincide. After likening Gnatho to a half-burned corpse, Sidonius gives a picture of the man's face. The passage ought to be quoted, both because it is an extremely early description of ugliness and because it typifies many later depictions of unsightly men:42 ... he has eyes devoid of light, which, like the pool of Styx, roll their tears onward through darkness. Also he has ears elephantine in their vastness; the two apertures are encircled by ulcerated skin, and stony knots and warts oozing with pus project along the exterior curves. Also he carries a nose that is large in its openings and constricted at its bridge, gaping wide enough to give you the creeps, yet too narrow for the sense of smell. He displays a mouth with leaden lips and the ravening jaws of a wild beast, with festering gums and yellow teeth; it is frequently befouled by a mephitic stench exhaled from the hollow seat of decaying grinders; and this stench is reinforced by meaty belching from yesterday's feast and the sewage of suppers that keep coming back upon him. He also shows a forehead which has a most disgusting trick of wrinkling the skin and stretching the eybrows. He likewise grows a beard, which is already whitening with old age and yet blackening with Sulla's disease [i.e., venereal disease].

This profile places exceptional emphasis on visible physical corruption - pus, ulcers, warts, and abscesses - and on the accompanying stench. It proves to us that Gnatho's physical state is just as depraved as his moral condition, which Sidonius has already characterized.

The rhetorical theories which induced Sidonius to describe personal appearance from top to bottom and to connect physical appearance with moral state persisted into the Middle Ages. On the subject of head-to-toe description, Geoffrey ofVinsauf stated precisely: 'Et sic / A summo capitis descendat splendor ad ipsam / Radicem, totumque simul poliatur ad unguem' (Poetria Nova, 597-99; see Salmon, pp. 520-2I). On description as a means of eliciting approval or disapproval, Matthew of Vendome is equally clear: 'Hic enim nihil aliud est argumentum, sive locus a nomine vel a natura, nisi per interpretationem nominis et per naturales proprietates de persona aliquid probare vel improbare, personam propriare vel impropriare' (i, 76). Elsewhere Matthew declares that descriptions serve either to praise (praeconium) or to blame (vituperium: I, 59).

If we search for traces of these two rhetorical techniques in twelfth-century literature, we find them at least once in a fictional character who owes much to Sidonius's Gnatho. Vitalis of Blois, evidently bored after the stock silhouette of his heroine Alda in the comedy Aulularia, moves on to analyse minutely the looks of a slave whose very name - Spurius - betrays the falsity of his nature. Vitalis welds the slave's low social class, moral infelicities, and physical shortcomings into one consistent and abominable whole.43 But not only in the learned Latin heritage do head-to-foot descriptions of hideous men appear; in the twelfth century they were

42 See Paul Salmon, 'The Wild Man in "Iwein" and Medieval Descriptive Technique', MLR, 56 ( 96I ), 520-28. 43 See La 'Comedie'latine en France au XlIe siecle, edited by Gustave Cohen, Vol. i (Paris, 193I), pp. 136-37 (11. 71-92). The self-description of Geta, in the comedy by Vitalis which is known as the Geta, is similar, although less orderly: see Cohen, I, 48-49 (11. 331-52).

JAN ZIOLKOWSKI 9

carried into the vernacular languages, presumably thanks to rhetorical training. To name only one salient appearance in Old French, Chr6tien de Troyes follows the rhetorically correct format in recording the facial features of a ghastly giant who figures in his Yvain. As in the Aulularia, the description balances by contrast a rather brief sketch of a beautiful girl that preceded it.44

Through a web of similes and metaphors, Chretien likens his giant to a half-dozen animals: the creature has the head of a horse, ears of an elephant, eyes of an owl, nose of a cat, mouth of a wolf, and teeth of a boar. By means of these comparisons, Chretien heightens the air of bestiality which surrounds the ill-mannered giant, but he does not turn the unprepossessing description into an open denunciation of the giant. Rather, his description is primarily decorative, like a sculpted medieval grotesque in which 'a monster seems to be the result of a breaking down of normal creatures and a recombination of parts of them' (Farnham, The Shakespearean Grotesque, p. 4). In one later case, however, animal comparisons and other elements of the head-to-toe description help a writer to express his condemnation of a giant's character. This later case is the giant in the fourteenth-century alliterative Morte Arthure.45 In the space of thirty lines, the monster is likened to a dozen wild animals. His lower limbs receive an unusually full treatment, when measured against the straightforward rhetorical descriptions which avoided all mention of the body below the waist:

Schovell-fotede was that schalke and schaylande hym semyde With schankez unschaply, schowand togedyrs; Thykke theese as a thursse and thikkere in the hanche, Greese-growen as a galte, full gryslych he lukez.46

The pointed mention that the giant has the fat thighs of a pig might incline us to investigate his sexual habits. We find, in fact, that in his first appearance he is squatting by a fire and munching on a man's thigh. When Arthur arrives to punish him for having raped a noblewoman to pieces and for having eaten hundreds of baptized children, a battle ensues in which we learn still more about the physiology and physiognomy of the giant. Unaffected by blows to the brain, the monstrosity does not succumb until struck in his only truly vital organs - the testicles.

The alliterative form of the Morte Arthure, so remote from the Latin hexameter and the Old French octosyllabic line, should not trick us into regarding the description of the giant as an isolated or independent phenomenon.47 Rather, we should realize that the alliterative poets were well aware of formal descriptio48 and that con- sequently the Morte Arthure giant stands firmly in the rhetorical continuum leading back to Sidonius and the schools of late antiquity and forward to the Renaissance. Just like Spurius in the Aulularia or like the ladies of ill fame we shall soon see in late medieval lyric poems, the giant of St Michael's Mount is ugly because he is bad. A

44 See Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), edited by Mario Roques (Paris, 97 I), 11. 224-44 (the girl) and 286-324 (the vilains). 45 For an extensive treatment of the giant, see John Finlayson, 'Arthur and the Giant of St Michael's

Mount', Medium Aevum, 33 ( 964), I I2-20. 46 Morte Arthure, edited by John Finlayson (Evanston, Illinois, 1971), 11. IO98-1IOI. (There are no

substantial differences in this passage among the editions by Brock, Finlayson, and Valerie Krishna.) 47 SeeJohn Finlayson, 'Rhetorical Descriptio of Place in Morte Arthure', Modern Philology, 56 (1963), I-I I. 48 See Pearsall, p. 131, and Curry, The Middle English Ideal, passim.

Ugliness in Medieval Literature

thorough enumeration of a giant's or a dwarf's bodily defects was not only an amusing interlude of teratology; it was also a poet's best way of conveying failings in a giant's or a dwarf's character.49 'Few general epithets are wasted on an ugly giant; to know that he is unutterably evil, it is quite sufficient to describe his repulsive person' (see Curry, The Middle English Ideal, pp. 6-7). Raoul de Houdenc, the author of the Old French Meraugis de Portlesguez, put an accent on the correspondence between bodily ugliness and moral wickedness when he described:

Uns chevaliers, Belchis li lois, Qui a le front plus noir que pois. C'est li plus lais qu'onques nature Feist onques, nes creature Ne fu qui tant vousist mal faire.50

Since the correspondence was taken for granted, it is not surprising that ugly giants call to mind medieval pictorial representations of demons (see Finlayson, 'Arthur and the Giant', p. I 4) and that in Old French romances ugly characters were compared with the devil.l5 After all, Lucifer himself lost his peerless beauty and was turned into the ugliest of beings on account of a moral lapse: his rebellion against God (Dante, Inferno xxxiv).

At this point I have explored some dozen representations of ugliness, mainly from rhetorical handbooks, romances, and plays. I have shown that such tableaux could have originated in the schools, either as assigned compositions to complement descriptions of beauty or as extracurricular burlesques. The schools, keeping alive the late classical habit, taught writers to link the physical and moral nature of persons described. By doing so, the schools gave the impulse for the memento mori and the young whore/old whore pairings as well as for bad and ugly giants.

The time has now come to look at the strongest evidence for a tradition of ugliness descriptions: an entire sub-class of late medieval English lyric poems which contain vituperative descriptions that invert the accepted catalogue of charms. In the rest of this paper I shall examine this rich counter-tradition to determine to what extent it combines rhetorical playfulness and moral commentary as the earlier Latin and French examples did. In looking at the rhetoric of the ugliness poems, we may also see how ugliness allowed medieval poets freedoms that beauty could not - how ugliness encouraged individuality of expression when beauty trammelled it. For beauty there was one ideal; for ugliness there were many avatars.

The earliest ironic portrait extant among Middle-English lyrics comprises the third section of a triple roundel on Lady Money; the poem is usually ascribed to Thomas Hoccleve (I370?-I 426?). The poet pretends to praise his mistress, who is none other than Lady Money. In the opening stanza, repeated three times subsequently as a refrain, he describes the lady's forehead, brows, and eyes:

49 For a convenient index of descriptions of ugly giants (and dwarfs) in Old French, see Fritz Wohlgemuth, Riesen und Zwerge in den altfranzosischen erzahlenden Dichtung, Inaugural Dissertation (Tiibingen and Stuttgart, I906), pp. I2-38 and 8o-83. Recent research on dwarfs is summarized in Claude Lecouteux, 'Zwerge und Verwandte', Euphorion, 75 (I98I), 366-78. 50 Edited by Henri Victor Michelant (Paris, I869), p. I6o. 51 See Jean Loubier, Das Ideal der mannlichen Schonheit bei den altfranzosischen Dichtern des XII. und XIII.

Jahrhunderts, Inaugural Dissertation (Halle, 1890), pp. 132-33.

IO

JAN ZIOLKOWSKI

Of my lady, wel me reioise I may: hir golden forheed is ful narw & smal; hir browes been lyk to dym reed coral;

And as the Ieet/hir yen glistren ay.52

Hoccleve relies upon three different devices here to underline humorously his lady's ugliness: displacement, antithesis, and exaggeration of the norms of beauty as set forth in the catalogues of charms. Whereas straightforward laudatory descriptions often begin by mentioning the maiden's golden hair (with a line such as 'Her heere is yellou as the golde'), Hoccleve takes the golden quality which would be a virtue in blonde hair and applies it to his lady's forehead, which ideally would be lily-white and not sallow.53 Stressing ugliness by displacement, Hoccleve attributes to the wrong area what would be gorgeous in another part of the body. Then playing on the accepted attractiveness of moderately wide and broad foreheads, the poet notes facetiously that his lady has a very narrow and small forehead. On this occasion expressing ugliness by making it antithetical to beauty, Hoccleve again denigrates Lady Money. As his third device, Hoccleve illustrates his lady's hideousness by attributing to her an excess of what in moderation would.be beautiful. In a typical medieval catalogue of charms, the poet extols the woman's rosy facial complexion and delicate grey eyes. One finds, for example, the lines: 'her lovely yen of colour gray/ Her rudy is like the rose yn may'.54 Distorting these features, Hoccleve remarks upon his mistress's coral-red skin and jet-black eyes; the hyperbole would not have been lost on his medieval readers.

Hoccleve continues with backhanded compliments, now concentrating his attention on his lady's face. Her cheeks and jaws are big and fat. Her mouth, equally large, has grey lips. Though her chin is almost non-existent, her 'comly body' protrudes like a 'foot-bal' (1. I9). Before the final refrain, Hoccleve concludes with a remark on her voice: 'And shee syngith/ ful lyk a papeJay' (1. 20). Why did Hoccleve choose to compare her singing with a parrot's? The bestiaries and handbooks such as Alexander Neckham's De naturis rerum popularized the conception of the parrot as a big-tongued, talkative, stubborn, and treacherous bird.55 These faults all fit well into the picture Hoccleve drew of his faithless and troublesome mistress. After all, Hoccleve meant to criticize money and man's misplaced faith in it. To this end he made use of the medieval association between physical ugliness and moral wickedness, especially in fictional characters. If in the process he could adduce animals connoting both bodily and spiritual deformity, so much the better.

At the same time as the London clerk Hoccleve flourished, the monk John Lydgate was producing his ream after ream of verse. Among his more than 145,000 lines is the poem with the incipit 'My fayr lady, so fressh of hewe'. In customarily exhaustive fashion, Lydgate devotes 168 lines to an ironic description of one woman. The poet makes obvious in the second stanza his intention to follow the standard order of description:

52 Hoccleve's Works, n: 'The Minor Poems', edited by Israel Gollancz (London, 1925), pp. 37-38. 53 Compare Chaucer, 'The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse', 11. Io-I I. 54 Lines 25-26 in the poem edited by Bernhard Fehr, 'Weitere Beitrage zur englischen Lyrik', Archivfur

das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Litteraturen, I o7 (190 ), 53-55. 55 The Bestiary: A Book ofBeasts, translated by T. H. White (New York, I960), pp. I2-I4, and Alexander

Neckham, De naturis rerum, edited by Thomas Wright (London, 1863), pp. 87-90 and 378-79.

II

Ugliness in Medieval Literature

For yif I shuld hire al discrye, Fro the heed to the novyl, and so forth down,

I trowe there is noon suych alyve.56

Yet, like Hoccleve, Lydgate displaces, contrasts, and exaggerates the normal feminine charms with heavy irony so that the picture he presents is anything but

complimentary. Lydgate far outstrips Hoccleve in animal similes and metaphors. The green-

hooded lady boasts of hair shorn like a sheep; brows as soft as swine's bristles; a belly as big as a cow's and as hairy as a goat's beard; skin as rough as a hound-fish; buttocks as broad as a Spanish steed's; and limbs like an elephant's. This animal

atmosphere corroborates the strong implication of lechery in the reiterated image of her green hood.57 The woman's torrid sexuality becomes explicit in the hunt

imagery that appears near the end of the poem. Lydgate tells us that the lady loves

good bowmen, especially those who can shoot both stiff and low. In the following stanzas, the lady metamorphoses from hunted deer into a fowler. To conclude with a

light touch, the poet recalls more savoury birds: he says he will not lament his lady until, awakened by the call of the nightingale or cuckoo, he finds himself at her side, looking upon her green hood. In other words, he intends to avoid her bed at all costs.

Various literary sources could have inspired the animal similes and metaphors found in 'My fayr lady, so fressh of hewe'. Animal comparisons are prominent in

early rhetorical descriptions of ugliness (Sidonius's portrait of Gnatho has three), are a constant in misogynistic literature,58 and receive considerable attention in

physiognomical treatises.59 Yet the comparisons may have been suggested by Lydgate's knowledge of Middle-English literature. Indeed, the comparison of the

lady's skin with the hound-fish's finds a precise precedent in the description of the

giant of St Michael's Mount in the alliterative Morte Arthure: Hire skyn is tendyr for to towche,

As of an hownd-fyssh or of an hake ('My fayr lady', p. 201)

Harske as a hunde-fisch, hardly who so lukez, So was the hyde of tha hulke hally al over.

(M.A., 11. o084-85)

A more probable source of influence is Chaucer, who often used a combination of

physiognomic traits and animal similes to affirm a character's lust. Particularly close to Lydgate's lady is Chaucer'sJanuary, the old man of the Merchant's Tale who burns with desire for his young wife:

56John Lydgate, 'A Satirical Description of his Lady', in Percy Society, Vol. II: 'Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages', edited by J. 0. Halliwell and J. Payne Collier (London, I840), pp. I99-205. 57 See Thomas W. Ross, Chaucer's Bawdy (New York, 1972), p. 44 (on the refrain in Chaucer's 'Against

Women Inconstant'); but more telling evidence is in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid (11. 2 8-24), where Venus is clad one half in green and one half in black, colours which the poet implies represent her twin traits of inconstancy and perfect reliability. 58 For examples in Greek poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries B.c., see Semonides and his imitator,

Phocylides. For comparisons of women with animals in medieval misogynistic literature, see August Wulff, Die frauenfeindlichen Dichtungen in den romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters bis zum Ende des XIII. Jahrhunderts (Halle, 1914), pp. 70, 78, 1I2, I 4-15, and 156-58. 59 See Foerster, Scriptores Physiognomici, I, 5-91 passim (Bartholamaeus de Messana) and I, 136-45 (Anonymi de physiognomia liber). Albertus Magnus's treatise, De animalibus, combines physiognomy and zoology throughout: see the edition by Hermann Stadler, 2 vols (Miinster, I9I6-20).

I2

JAN ZIOLKOWSKI I3

He was al coltissh, ful ofragerye, And ful ofjargon as a flekked pye. The slakke skyn about his nekke shaketh ...

(11. 1847-49)

Most telling is the description ofJanuary's newly-shaved face: He lulleth hire, he kisseth hire ful ofte; With thikke brustles of his berd unsofte, Lyk to the skyn of houndfyssh, sharp as brere...

(11. 1823-25)

Although no other character in The Canterbury Tales is compared with the hound-fish, several others have physical features considered indicative of salaciousness and are compared with animals.60

Lydgate's poem was not only a recipient of the literary tradition of ugliness; 'My fayr lady' itself slightly influenced the phrasing of two anonymous lyrics from the second half of the fifteenth century.61 Yet in the originality of their conception, these poems resemble Hoccleve's triple roundel more than Lydgate's wordy lyric. Where Lydgate simply described a woman ironically (albeit at great length), Hoccleve went so far as to experiment with poetic form by fitting his ironic description into a triple roundel. Similarly, the nameless poet of these two lyrics made them into an epistolary doublet. A delicate network of similarities and contrasts connects the letter from the girl with her lover's reply.

The verse letter from the girl to her lover includes the only ironic catalogue of a man's handsomeness found in Middle-English lyric poetry. After an opening address to her negligent lover, the girl proposes to describe him. She finds this task easy, since her lover has an unusual body. He has a countenance as noble as the owl is among other fowl. His flat nose reminds one of a cat or a hare. His clothes hang upon him as if he were an old goose with a broken wing. As in the poem by Lydgate, the comparisons here, between the person described and animals, tend to emphasize his animal nature. They prepare the way for further indications of the man's base nature, such as the stanza in which the letter-writer details the faults of her lover's legs. The legs, usually played down in straightforward catalogues of charms, gain importance here as emblems of the lover's wayward desires:

your thyghes mysgrowen, your shankys mych worse; Whoso beholde youre knees so crokyd -

As ych of hem bad odyr Crystes curse, So go they outward; youre hammys ben hokyd; Such a peyre Chaumbys I neuer on lokyd!

So vngoodly youre helys ye lyfte, And youre feet be crokyd, with euyl thryfte.

(11. 22-28)

In a final vulgar stanza, the girl makes apparent that she is attacking her lover's lust in particular.

Curiously, the girl's scornful description of her former lover resembles the stereotyped portraits of ugly giants found in medieval romances. As we have seen,

60 See George B. Page, 'Physiognomy and Chaucer's Summoner and Alisoun', Traditio, I8 (1962), 417-20. 61 Edited twice by Rossell Hope Robbins: Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (Oxford, I952),

pp. 219-22 (nos 208 and 209), and 'Two Middle English Satiric Love Epistles', MLR, 37 (1942), 415-2 I.

I4 Ugliness in Medieval Literature

the giant herdsman in Chretien de Troyes's twelfth-century Yvain has the same flat face with eyes like a screech-owl's and nose like a cat's. Likewise, in the attention given to the lover's misshapen legs, the girl's saucy catalogue is reminiscent of the giant in the alliterative Morte Arthure. The monster there, as we saw, is shovel-footed, unshapely in the shanks, and fat-thighed like a hog (11. O98-I Io ). The faithless lover of this lyric and the giants of romance share too many spiritual and physical attributes to be completely unrelated, but the anonymous author of the two epistolary lyrics probably knew neither the work of Chretien nor the alliterative MorteArthure. The most plausible explanation for the resemblances between the lyric and the romances is not that one author influenced the others, but rather that all three writers participated in the same rhetorical tradition.

The lover counters the girl's letter with a retaliatory ironic catalogue of charms. In the process he reveals exactly how little he understood the underlying meaning of her letter to him. He begins by addressing his deserted lover 'O fresch floure', a phrase harking back to Troilus's missive to Criseyde (which opens with the words 'Right fresshe flour, whos I ben have and shal' (Book v. 1316)). Yet this lover, lacking in fidelity, does not echo Troilus's pledge, but only the rhetorical opening. Rhetoric, in fact, has mesmerized him; as a result, he does not argue with the logic of his lover's argument, but rather with the phrasing (11. 8-14). For all his knowledge of Chaucer, this rhetorician seems to have forgotten what Criseyde said in her letter to Troilus (Book v. I625-3I). Criseyde emphasized sense over style, but this lover honours a different code of values.

Many little touches of the lover's reply recall the girl's letter mockingly. He claims that her teeth are set wide apart as if cursing each other, which is what she said of his knees. She suggested that his clothes hung on him like an old goose with a broken wing; he retorts that when she dances on a holy day her face resembles a wild goose. Yet the two epistolary lyrics avoid tedious repetition, because they describe two contrasting paradigms of ugliness. The man has the flat face and nose of a cat or hare, with poorly-fitting clothes and crooked legs. She, on the other hand, has a huge head, round forehead, crooked nose, enormous nostrils, thick lips, yellow crooked teeth, fat belly, crooked back, splay feet, and ridiculously-styled clothes. Though both are superlatively ugly, they have no identical defects; they confirm that the Middle Ages had more varieties of absolute ugliness than of absolute beauty.

In a Cambridge manuscript only slightly more recent than this doublet of letters are two satirical depictions of women.62 The first poem ('I haue a lady where so she be') employs oblique criticism with a vengeance. As the framework for this criticism, the poem relies on an inverted catalogue of charms: the lady in question is fat and small, and has hollow green eyes, bent brows, short fingers, and rough skin. It contains many cliches from the typical descriptions, yet reverses their meanings by undercutting them at the last possible moment (a ploy seen often in English misogynistic poetry):63

Therto she hath ofeuery comlynesse Suche quantyte yeuyn hyr by nature That with the leest she ys of hyr stature

(11. 12-14)

62 Edited by Henry A. Person, Cambridge Middle English Lyrics (Seattle, 1953), pp. 38-41 (nos 48 and 49). 63 On the 'destroying burden' and dispraise 'per antiphrasim', see Francis Lee Utley, The Crooked Rib (Columbus, Ohio, 1944), nos 136, 307, and 334.

JAN ZIOLKOWSKI

And of hir wytte as sympyll and innocent As ys a chylde that can no good at all

(11. I7-I8)

The same juggling of conventions and teasing of the reader appear in other late medieval English lyrics, but this is the only poem that deploys them in an attack on one particular lady.

In the penultimate stanza of'I haue a Lady where so she be' the poet subtly discloses his lady's great age. He declares that she was fifteen when the wedding of Joan of Navarre to Henry IV took place in 1403; since he was writing in the late fifteenth century, this fact lends a trenchant irony to the concluding line of the stanza: 'I trow ther are nat many suche alyue' (1. 42). If the lady was in truth a nonagenarian, there would not have been many like her alive!

The lady's age, more than any other factor, would have suggested one of several animal similes and metaphors in the poem:

And slowth noone shall haue in her entresse So dylygent ys she and virtulesse And so besy ay all good to vndresse That as a she ape she ys harmelesse

(11.29-31)

The simian comparison has a long and rich history in poetry.64 In one ofJuvenal's Satires (x. I95) an old person's wrinkles are likened to those of a mater simia. In the eleventh-century Latin poem Ruodlieb an old woman is also likened to a she-ape.65 The description of an old woman which follows the ape simile in the Ruodlieb goes from head to foot enumerating the changes wrought in a woman's body by old age. It would be tempting to hypothesize that the Ruodlieb, with its juxtaposition of the ape simile and 'ugly old age' description, influenced the English poet of'I haue a Lady where so she be'. But because the Ruodlieb never circulated widely even within its native Germany it is clear that the real connexion between the two poems is the centuries-old rhetorical tradition. The tradition provided models not only for catalogues of charms, but also for 'ugly old age' descriptions; thus the tradition accounts for such startling similarities in texts written hundreds of years and miles apart.

'I haue a Lady where so she be' leads smoothly into the lyric that follows it in the Cambridge manuscript ('O mosy Quince hangyng by your stalke'). The two poems share the theme of old age's ugliness as well as the rhetorical structure provided by the inverted catalogue. The second poem begins with an apostrophe to a rotten quince that no passer-by will pick. The next stanza unfolds the theme of old age's woes, while the third details the repulsiveness of one woman's body:

Your vgly chere deynous & froward Your grene eyen frownyng and nat glad Yowre chekes enbonyd lyke a melow costard Colour of Orenge your brestys satournad Gylt opon warantyse the colour wyll nat fade Bawsyn buttockyd belyed lyke a toune Men cry seynt Barbara at lowsyng of your goune.

(11. 15-21 )

64 It is not examined in H. W.Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (London, 1952); but see William Coffman McDermott, The Ape in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1938), pp. 142-43. 65 Fragment xv (xiv), 3-4 (as edited by Langosch).

I5

i6 Ugliness in Medieval Literature

Despite the gravity of the old-age theme, the poet maintains a mocking tone and finishes the stanza on a very light note; St Barbara was invoked in the Middle Ages as protection against lightning, but here she is called upon for mercy when the old lady takes off her gown.66

William Dunbar ( 46o?-I 520?), writing a few years later, devised a unique use for the ironic catalogue of charms, but still struck thejocular tone characteristic of these lyrics. He pictured an actual woman, a negress offered as first prize in ajoust in 1507. He commences his short poem 'Of ane Blak-Moir' by voicing his boredom with inditing poems about white women. Now he wishes to describe a different sort of woman, the black woman whom the refrain labels insultingly 'My ledye with the mekle lippis'.67 In his depiction, however, he uses only a few concrete descriptive details and does not present them in the traditional order. Her mouth, he says, resembles an ape's as well as a toad's and her nose is short. She shines like black soap and a tar barrel; when she was born, the sun suffered an eclipse. At the conclusion of the poem, Dunbarjests that, whereas the winner of the match 'sail kis and withe hir go in grippis' (1. I8), the loser will only get to kiss her behind the hips.

Roughly a decade after Dunbar wrote 'Of ane Blak-Moir',John Skelton (1460?- 1529) wrote a song about an ale-wife entitled 'The Tunnyng ofElynour Rummyng' (c. I517).68 This lyric too may well treat of a real person; an infamous barmaid Elynour Rummyng lived during Skelton's period. The collapse of the medieval descriptive method stands out even more in Skelton's poem than in Dunbar's, perhaps because the portrait in 'The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng' reveals its disorganization at much greater length. With little apparent thought for structure, Skeltonjumps around from face, to lips, to nose, to skin, to back, to eyes, to hair, to jaws, tojoints, to feet, to legs, and finally to clothes. Like Lydgate, Skelton describes the roughness of the lady's skin in terms of hog's hair, but specifies the hair inside a roast pig's ear.69 Throughout, realistic details have entirely replaced the symbolic ones, unless Elynour's Lincoln green cape signifies lechery in the tradition of Lydgate's lady with the green hood. The picture of Elynour's other clothes is so verisimilar, however, that experts believe it to be the earliest surviving description of gypsy attire.70

In the middle decades of the sixteenth century the medieval method of description enjoyed a final moment of glory, thanks to the vogue of blason and contre-blason.71 Although the Italian strambotti and the Greek Anthology played their part in encouraging the blasonniers and providing them with material and techniques, medieval descriptions in particular influenced the development of the blason.72 How closely the goals of medieval descriptio matched the new type of poetry emerges in Thomas Sebillet's ( 512?-1589) definition of blason:

66 See Donald Attwater, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (Harmondsworth, i965), p. 57 ('Barbara'). 67 The Poems of William Dunbar, edited by W. Mackay Mackenzie (Edinburgh, I932), pp. 66-67. 68 John Skelton: Poems, edited by Robert S. Kinsman (Oxford, 1969), pp. 53-70. For other ale-wife poems,

see Utley, The Crooked Rib, nos 0o7, 172, and 249. 69 The hair and skin of giants were often compared with parts of a pig: see Curry, The Middle English Ideal, pp. 23, 34, 39, and 47.

John Skelton: Poems, p. 153 (note to line 78). 71 I thank the former English Editor of thisjournal, Professor G. K. Hunter, for bringing to my attention

the need to consider the blason and contre-blason tradition as well as the passages in Peele and Lyly. 72 On the origins of the blasons, see Charles Kinch, La Poesie satirique de Climent Marot (Paris, 1940),

pp. 09-29, and Enzo Giudici, Le opere minori di Maurice Sceve (Parma, 1958), pp. 65-169.

JAN ZIOLKOWSKI I7

Le Blason est une perpetuele louenge ou continu vitupere de ce qu'on s'est propose blasonner. Pource serviront bien a celuy qui le voudra faire, tous les lieus de demonstration escris par les rh6teurs Grecz et Latins. Je dy en l'une et l'autre partie de louenge et de vitupere. Car autant bien se blasonne le laid comme le beau, et le mauvais com le bon: tesmoin Marot en ses Blasons du beau et du laid Tetin: et sortent les deus d'une mesme source, comme louenges et invectives.73

As in the Middle Ages, description seems to be a matter of praising the beautiful and

good or blaming the ugly and bad; as in the Middle Ages, this conception of

description is regarded as continuing an ancient rhetorical custom.

Although blasons exist from before 1535, the heyday of the poems came in the half

century between I535 and I585.74 The poem that launched the blason into its brief but spectacular orbit was Clement Marot's 'Blason du Beau Tetin', composed in

I535.75 A courtly and elegant praise of a woman's breasts, Marot's blason soon

inspired a host of imitators, all eager to lavish their descriptive skills on a single part of the female body. In response to the shower of poems, Marot (I496-I 544) in 1536 wrote an epistle directed 'A Ceulx qui, apres l'Epigramme du Beau Tetin en Feirent d'Autres' and urged his followers to write contre-blasons, poems detailing an

exceptionally ugly member of an unattractive woman's body. As an example he sent his 'Blason du Laid Tetin'.76

Between 1535 and 1550, the blasons were assembled in a collection entitled Blasons

anatomiques du corpsfemenin, which grew from ten to thirty-nine poems in the course of

eight reprintings. Although most of the blasons and contre-blasons describe only one

part of the body, two come strikingly close to medieval descending descriptions. One is reminiscent of the twelfth-century Latin 'Musa iocosa veni, mihi carmina suggere vati' which I mentioned above; in the 'Blason du corps' that begins 'Ma plume est lente, et ma main paresseuse', the poet moves systematically down the body of a woman, until he reaches her pudendum and forgets about the rest. Like his Latin

predecessor, the Frenchman attributes great power to the organ too private to name: 'O c. .., o c .. ., que tu as de puissance!'77 Another blason, although a straight- forward antifeminist description of ugliness, proceeds in distressingly exhaustive detail from head to foot, with no omissions made for the sake of propriety (Blasons, edited by Meon, pp. 92-97).

The blason and contre-blason helped to keep alive the rhetorical description of

beauty and ugliness in English literature during the second half of the sixteenth

century, if we take Shakespeare at his word: When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,

73 Art poetiquefranfoys, edited by Felix Gaiffe (Paris, I90o), p. 169. Claude de Boissiere and Pierre de Laudun d'Aigaliers define blason similarly in their Arts poetiques (see Gaiffe, p. 69, note ). For a survey of modern definitions, see Annette and Edward Tomarken, 'The Rise and Fall of the Sixteenth-Century French blason', Symposium, 29 (1975), 39-63. 74 On the chronology, see Robert E. Pike, 'The "Blasons" in French Literature of the Sixteenth Century', Romanic Review, 27 (1936), 223-42 (especially pp. 230-33). 75 Clement Marot, Les Epigrammes, edited by C. A. Mayer (Works, v (London, I970)), pp. I56-57. 76 Clement Marot, Les Epigrammes, pp. 158-59, and Les Epitres, edited by C. A. Mayer (Works, I (London, I958)), p. 213-17.

7 The most accessible edition is in Blasons; podsies anciennes des XV et XVImes siecles, extraites de diffdrens auteurs imprimes et manuscrits, nouvelle edition, by D[ominique] M[artin] M[eon] (Paris, I809), pp. 88-9 .

Ugliness in Medieval Literature

Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have express'd Even such a beauty as you master now.

(Sonnet o06. I-8)

In any event, the orderly catalogue of charms appears again and again in the poems of Sir Philip Sidney ( 554-86).78 As we would expect, the ubiquity of such beauty descriptions prompted a reaction. George Peele (I558?-1597?), in The Old VViues tale, includes a description of beauty that seems to be facetiously inelegant:

Hir Corall lippes, hir crimson chinne, Hir siluer teeth so white within: Hir golden locks hir rowling eye, Hir pretty parts let them goe by: Hey ho hath wounded me, That I must die this day to see.79

John Lyly ( 554?-1606?), in his Endimion, brings forth a portrait of ugliness which is

equally ironic: I loue no grissels; they are so brittle, they will cracke like glasse, or so dainty, that if they bee touched they are straight of the fashion ofwaxe: Animus maioribus instat. I desire olde Matrons. What a sight would it be to embrace one whose hayre were as orient as the pearle! whose teeth shal be so pure a watchet, that they shall staine the truest Turkis! and whose nose shall throwe more beames from it then the fierie Carbuncle! whose eyes shall be enuirond about with rednesse exceeding the deepest Corall! And whose lippes might compare with siluer for the palenesse!80

Whether inspired by blasons or by the English poetry of his contemporaries, Lyly was

ultimately indebted to the Middle Ages for this scrambling of epithets and parts of the body.

Although in the sixteenth century poets continued to practise the time-worn methods of description, they faced mounting pressure to revise their procedures. They could easily renounce the need to move from head to foot, since earlier poets had already taken liberties with the descending catalogue.81 More troublesome was to cope with the realization that beauty comes in many forms, not just blonde and

blue-eyed. In making the transition to a multiplicity of beauties, poets may have been encouraged by popular poetry, in which the brunette had held her own for centuries.82 For whatever reasons, sixteenth-century poets lost all trace of hesitancy in expressing their fondness and admiration for dark-haired ladies. Once such old

78 See The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by William A. Ringler,Jr (Oxford, 1962), pp. 409-10 (notes on poem 62). Sidney's 'What toong can her perfections tell' (Ringler, pp. 85-90) contains a particularly interesting play on the descending catalogue. 79 The Malone Society reprints, prepared by the general editor (W. W. Greg) and checked by Frank Sidgwick (London, 1909), 11.838-43. 80 Act v, Scene 2, in The Complete Works ofJohn Lyly, edited by R. Warwick Bond (Oxford, 1902 and 1967),

III, 70-7I. 81 On the history of head-to-toe description, see Ernest Gallo, The Poetria Nova and Its Sources in Early

Rhetorical Doctrine (The Hague, 1971), pp. 182-87. On the liberties taken by poets in handling the descending catalogue, see Colby, The Portrait, p. 22, and Kevin S. Kiernan, 'The Art of the Descending Catalogue, and a Fresh Look at Alisoun', Chaucer Review, Io (1975), i-I6. 82 See Rodolfo Renier, II tipo estetico della donna nel medioevo (i885; reprinted Bologna, I972), Chapter 7,

'Arte biondeggiante - Poesia popolare', and Marcel Francon, Notes sur l'esthetique de lafemme au XVIe siicle (Cambridge, Massachusetts, I939).

JAN ZIOLKOWSKI

standards of beauty as blondeness and of ugliness as darkness had disappeared, less prominent attributes of beauty were bound to come under question. Moreover, as the head-to-toe catalogue of charms became uncertain, so did the previously unshakable conviction that the beautiful and the good, like the ugly and the bad, were merely different names for the same qualities.

Not until Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 did the old catalogue, already disintegrating, become totally discredited. Roughly a century earlier, William Dunbar playfully expressed his dissatisfaction with the stock catalogue of charms. Yet in lieu of rejecting the tradition, he discovered a new subject for caricature, his 'Blak-Moir', and inverted the stale expressions that he claimed offended him. In contrast, William Shakespeare (I564-I616) scrutinized the tradition and found it severely lacking. Shakespeare knew the literary convention of beauty well. In The Rape of Lucrece (11. 386-483) he uses many stock metaphors and epithets in an absolutely straightforward way. In the comedies he shows signs of impatience with the conventions: in both Love's Labour's Lost (Iv. 3. 81-84) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (III. I. 82-97 and v. I. 328-41) he pokes fun at the catalogues of charms. In one sonnet ( o6. 6) he refers to the old catalogue, but (like Geoffrey ofVinsauf) takes the trouble to turn it upside down when he speaks 'Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eyes, and of brows'. In Sonnet I30 he goes still further in questioning the catalogue. He points out that his lady does not live up to any of the conventional measures of beauty, but he does not conclude from this observation that his lady is ugly. He implies that the literary canon is at fault, rather than his mistress. Though earlier poets, as has been seen, toyed with the conventional catalogue of charms by ironic inversions and by ignoring the proper order of description, Shakespeare was the first English poet to shatter the commonplaces by discarding them for reality. Yet his rejection recalls the old topoi, since in refuting them it lists them.83

Although poets after Shakespeare gradually moulted the old conventions, they still felt compelled to explain their reasons for so doing. John Donne's elegy 'The Anagram' exhorts a nameless young man to marry and love Flavia, who has all the makings of a true beauty, although the components are misplaced as in an anagram:

Marry, and love thy Flavia, for, shee Hath all things, whereby others beautious bee, For, though her eyes be small, her mouth is great, Though they be Ivory, yet her teeth arejeat, Though they be dimme, yet she is light enough, And though her harsh haire fall, her skinne is rough; What though her cheeks be yellow, her hair is red, Give her thine, and she hath a maydenhead.84

Donne (1573-I63 I) argues that plain women are like good angels and are suited for long travels, whereas beautiful women are like fallen angels and are good only for one night's revels. Failure to live up to the catalogue of charms is now a virtue, at

83 Shakespeare is mocking topoi, not parodying a particular poem: see Katherine Wilson, Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets (London, I974), pp. 83-85. 84John Donne, The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, edited by Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1965), p. 2I

(11. i-8). Compare Donne's playful handling of the descending catalogue in 'Loves Progress'. For a similar paradox, but in favour of sexual promiscuity, see 'The Fawne' (i 606) in The Plays ofJohn Marston, edited by H. Harvey Wood, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London, 1938-39), In, I69.

I9

Ugliness in Medieval Literature

least in paradoxical poetry,85 but although the thinking behind Donne's description of ugliness is new, the terms in which he expresses it are well worn. Knowingly or not, he is bringing forward the old medieval displacements, inversions, and exagger- ations of the norms of beauty.

The tradition of the ironic catalogue began when poets, bored with the conven- tional descriptions of beautiful women, playfully turned many of the commonplaces inside out for ironic effect. But these ante-Petrarchans were not anti-Petrarchans; the original standards were still taken for granted, a fact which sustained the humour first seen in English in Hoccleve's roundel. Behind the joking remains the certainty that true beauty, for literary purposes at least, should have a white forehead, rosy face, and shining eyes. When Shakespeare and Donne wrote their lyrics, however, newer and more personal concepts of true beauty clashed with the conventional catalogues of charms. Poets could no longer accept the simple equa- tions of 'beautiful is good' and 'bad is ugly'. They were ready both to dispense with the stock elements of feminine description and to break apart the long marriage of rhetorical description and ethical appraisal. At the same time, artists were showing that, if put into reality, the commonplace metaphors for beautiful women resulted in a monstrosity.86 Still, the very fact that the conflict continued so earnestly into the seventeenth century proves the hardiness of the usages propagated by medieval rhetorical training. Shakespeare and Donne were shattering the very chains with which Hoccleve and Lydgate had fumbled two centuries earlier, but the rattling of the chains lasted, in the form of 'deformed mistress' poems and paradoxical encomia, into the eighteenth century.87

JAN ZIOLKOWSKI HARVARD UNIVERSITY

85 The earliest such paradoxical encomium that I have seen is Francesco Berni's 'Sonnetto alla sua donna', in Francesco Berni. Poesie e prose, edited by Ezio Chi6rboli, Biblioteca dell'Archivum romanicum', Serie I, vol. 20 (Geneva and Florence, I934), p. 79. On the tradition behind Donne's praise of ugliness, see J. B. Leishman, The Monarch of Wit: An Analytical and Comparative Study of the Poetry of John Donne (London, I95I), pp. 74-81. 86 See the reproduction from The Extravagant Shepherd (1654) in Stephen Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets,

Edited with Analytic Commentary (New Haven, I977), p. 453. 87 See Henry Knight Miller, 'The Paradoxical Encomium', Modern Philology, 53 (I955-56), 145-78 (especially years 1637, I656, and I75I in the 'List'), and Timothy C. Blackburn, letter in PMLA, 9I ( 976), 46 -62. On the course of description in more recent times, see Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton, I982).

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