Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages by Classen Albrecht;

Author:Classen, Albrecht;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4523492
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

His fachon con he with hym take,

He laft hit not for weyle ne wrake,

Hyt hong ei be his syde.

[He did take his falchion with him,

He would leave it [behind] neither for joy nor pain,45

It hung always by his side.]

(256–58)

A crucial facet of his identity, the sword weathers the vicissitudes of “weyle” (joy) and “wrake” (pain), furnishing a sense of stability in a projected world that Gowther perceives as perpetually threatening.46 This experience of stability, however perverse, means that Gowther will never take the risk of abandoning his sword.47 Simultaneously an externalization of his vulnerability and of his sadism, the falchion is a permanent marker of his abjection, confirming his status as someone for whom culture has yet no proper meaning. Indeed, the sword becomes increasingly important in the ensuing text, always undermining the authenticity of Gowther’s purported salvation.

Gowther becomes further entrenched in perversity when he meets the pope to confess and learn the penance he must perform. Notably, Gowther confesses to no crimes, in part at least because news of the enormity of his violations against the Church have already reached Rome (280), but he does confess his fiendish origins by rehearsing his familial history (271–73). Gowther presents himself as victim rather than sinner, even responding to the pope’s outrage that “thou hast holy kyrke dystryed” (280; you have destroyed holy churches) with the rather audacious remark, “Nay, holy fadur, be thou noght agrevyd” (281; No, don’t be angry, holy father). The pope then issues a two-fold penitential commandment: he must lay down his sword (286) and he must eat only the food that he can snatch from the mouths of dogs, all the while remaining speechless (292–95). Gowther rejects the first command, insisting " This bous me nedus with mee beyr: / My frendys ar full thyn’” (290–91; This sword I must carry with me; my friends are very few). Sensing perhaps that Gowther’s perversity is intractable, the pope makes no further commands regarding the sword, and instead relies on his second order to do the work of correcting him.

The pope charges Gowther with a penance that puts socializing activities such as eating and speaking at the basic level of instinctual drives. Gowther’s sadistic urge, his will to destroy the object world, must be diverted, focused back on the self, through a primal process of abjection, a kind of masochism involving the intense self-surveillance necessary, for instance, to refuse the sociality of his fellow human beings. Forced to descend into the foundations of the social and the symbolic, to take up a position at the dawn of the speaking subject, Gowther is immersed more profoundly in the very state he had never been able to move out of, the abject. The pope, in short, sentences Gowther to more time in the realm of what Julia Kristeva calls abjection. Not simply a condition of animality or defilement as anthropologists such as Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas have defined it, abjection describes the dialectical process by which, prior to symbolization and

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