Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Medieval English and Dutch Literature in its European Context and the Work of David F. Johnson
- 1 Reconstructing a Lost Manuscript of the Old English Gospels
- 2 The Reception of the Old English Version of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues between the Conquest and the Close of the Nineteenth Century
- 3 An Unrecorded Copy of Heinrich Krebs’s An Anglo-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Dialogues, Printer’s Proofs
- 4 The Body as Media in Early Medieval England
- 5 Who Snatched Grendel in Beowulf 852b?
- 6 ‘Mobile as Wishes’: Anchoritism, Intersubjectivity, and Disability in the Liber confortatorius
- 7 The Presence of the Hands: Sculpture and Script in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries
- 8 Perceval’s Name and the Gifts of the Mother
- 9 A Relaxed Knight and an Impatient Heroine: Ironizing the Love Quest in the Second Part of the Middle Dutch Ferguut
- 10 Multilingualism in Van den vos Reynaerde and its Reception in Reynardus Vulpes
- 11 Three Characters as Narrator in the Roman van Walewein
- 12 As the Chess-Set Flies: Arthurian Marvels in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Roman van Walewein
- 13 For a Performer’s Personal Use: The Corrector’s Lines in the Lower Margin of the Middle Dutch Lanceloet Manuscript
- 14 ‘Oft leudlez alone’: The Isolation of the Hero and its Consequences in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 15 Shifting Skin: Passing as Human, Passing as Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 16 The Lover Caught Between his Mother and his Maiden in Lanseloet van Denemerken
- 17 Afterlives: The Abbey at Amesbury and the ‘Rehabilitation’ of Guinevere in Malory and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur
- 18 The Importance of Being an Arthurian Mother
- Select Bibliography
- Bibliography of David F. Johnson’s Works
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
6 - ‘Mobile as Wishes’: Anchoritism, Intersubjectivity, and Disability in the Liber confortatorius
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Medieval English and Dutch Literature in its European Context and the Work of David F. Johnson
- 1 Reconstructing a Lost Manuscript of the Old English Gospels
- 2 The Reception of the Old English Version of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues between the Conquest and the Close of the Nineteenth Century
- 3 An Unrecorded Copy of Heinrich Krebs’s An Anglo-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Dialogues, Printer’s Proofs
- 4 The Body as Media in Early Medieval England
- 5 Who Snatched Grendel in Beowulf 852b?
- 6 ‘Mobile as Wishes’: Anchoritism, Intersubjectivity, and Disability in the Liber confortatorius
- 7 The Presence of the Hands: Sculpture and Script in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries
- 8 Perceval’s Name and the Gifts of the Mother
- 9 A Relaxed Knight and an Impatient Heroine: Ironizing the Love Quest in the Second Part of the Middle Dutch Ferguut
- 10 Multilingualism in Van den vos Reynaerde and its Reception in Reynardus Vulpes
- 11 Three Characters as Narrator in the Roman van Walewein
- 12 As the Chess-Set Flies: Arthurian Marvels in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Roman van Walewein
- 13 For a Performer’s Personal Use: The Corrector’s Lines in the Lower Margin of the Middle Dutch Lanceloet Manuscript
- 14 ‘Oft leudlez alone’: The Isolation of the Hero and its Consequences in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 15 Shifting Skin: Passing as Human, Passing as Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 16 The Lover Caught Between his Mother and his Maiden in Lanseloet van Denemerken
- 17 Afterlives: The Abbey at Amesbury and the ‘Rehabilitation’ of Guinevere in Malory and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur
- 18 The Importance of Being an Arthurian Mother
- Select Bibliography
- Bibliography of David F. Johnson’s Works
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
Summary
GOSCELIN OF ST Bertin's Liber confortatorius (Book of Encouragement) [hereafter the Liber] is the first known work of spiritual guidance for an anchoress to have been composed in England. It is also a deeply personal letter designed to assuage the heartbreak occasioned by Goscelin's loss of his former student Eve, who had left Wilton Abbey (where Goscelin was probably serving as chaplain) c. 1080 to embrace a more reclusive life as an anchoress in Angers. Distraught over Eve's unannounced departure, Goscelin envisions the Liber as a substitute for his physical presence, a textual surrogate that might effectively reconnect two bodies whose former closeness was severed by geographic distance. Although the fact of their separation is bitter to Goscelin, he seeks comfort in the idea that ‘Loquetur etiam edificatius tenax pagina quam fluxa lingua’ [the tenacious page will speak more edifyingly than the fluid tongue] and that ‘alligare et refouere nos poterit intercurrens epistola’ [a letter shuttling back and forth can reconnect us and keep us warm].
The connection with Eve that Goscelin hopes to engender by his self-described peregrina epistola (26) ‘pilgrim letter’ (19) is merely one aspect of the Liber's sustained fascination with chaste human intimacies. Composed in the early 1080s during the first flourishing of Gregorian reforms, Goscelin's letter is filled with images that explore corporeal configurations and the spiritual and intellectual closeness they enable or refuse: conjoined female twins fused from the navel down; a hermit with his limbs stuck in a tree for fifteen years; a ‘double man’ sporting two torsos, four hands and feet, but only one soul; a dead girl whose womb swells with her foster father's unborn child; and the Liber itself, a letter to a lost beloved sealed with both lips and tears. That the Liber displays a strong interest in bodily union and spiritual intermingling is, in many ways, unsurprising. The text took shape during the early years of clerical reform, a religious movement notorious among scholars of women and gender for its increased scrutiny of human bodies and their interactions. Although scholars have amply recognized the Liber's investment in interpersonal relations, they have yet to investigate the extent to which interconnected, immobile, or restricted bodies – figures with physical configurations often categorized under the modern rubric of ‘disability’ – inform Goscelin's efforts to theorize the possibilities and dangers of human intimacy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Medieval English and Dutch Literatures: the European ContextEssays in Honour of David F. Johnson, pp. 103 - 126Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022