unproblematic, means to frame the discussion about contemplative and catechetical texts written in the vernacular, the phrase “vernacular theology” quickly came to mark the theological interests of various Middle English works not explicitly instructional or devotional1. In addition to Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, Margery Kempe, and the Cloud-author, we can now readily speak of Langland and the Gawain-author in these terms2. Such associations may seem appropriate enough at the moment, but this was not always the case. In 1981, Valerie Lagorio was arguing for “the broader and less restrictive mysticism [defined] as the progressive spiritual life of the Christian from purgation through contemplation to unity”3. Determining the mystical canon as such meant looking past a particular religious estate or experience and allowing for “works concerned with the methodology of mysticism”4. The extension of the term “mysticism” was controversial enough in the early 80s for Lagorio to be pressing the point, yet it anticipated the even more comprehensive purview that vernacular theology was to take within the next two decades.

The mingling of previously distinct canons was most effectively enabled by the broad definition of vernacular theology given by Nicholas Watson’s influential article on the subject, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England”5. Here, Watson defines vernacular theology as “any kind of writing, sermon, or play that communicates theological information to an audience”6. Intentionally phrased as a “catchall”, the breadth of this definition diminishes the strict generic

boundaries that perpetuate a divide between literary and non-literary texts. The immediate results suggested in Watson’s definition are thus two-fold: writings formerly corralled under the category of “mysticism” would gain new life and relevance apart from their insular sub-field, while the works once distinguished as “literary” would no longer retain a singular claim on the study of Middle English literature. Despite the expansive promise of Watson’s definition, however, the larger argument of “Censorship and Cultural Change” remained tethered to Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409, and the article’s effect has been to highlight the increased levels of suspicion regarding vernacular writings at the turn of the fifteenth century. Watson’s article expresses its intentions carefully and with nuance, yet its extensive influence on the study of vernacular theology has meant a predominant critical focus on the political implications of the vernacular within a very narrow period of time.

It is this particular model of vernacular theology that has most recently been the object of scrutiny. Critics like Kathryn Kerby-Fulton argue that the “draconian” influence of Arundel has been overstated, while others, employing related critiques, note the usefulness of extending vernacular theology’s purview beyond the chronological boundaries set by Watson’s focus on the Constitutions7. Reflecting on this limited chronology, Vincent Gillespie suggests that “it might now be better to work with the assumption that each sub period in medieval England produced multiple, interlocking, and overlapping vernacular theologies, each with complex intertextual and interlingual obligations and affiliations”8. The expanded terrain decidedly alters the political stakes, making clear the fact that not every theological work written in the vernacular felt the shadow of Arundel. This is obviously true pre-1407, and increasingly so after the first quarter of the fifteenth century. And even within Watson’s limited timetable, the extent to which Arundel’s Constitutions held sway has been convincingly challenged9. While vernacular theology may always be a political act, as Watson affirms in

his most recent assessment of the topic10, the power struggles outlined in “Censorship and Cultural Change” no longer delineate the field.

New political contexts evoke new questions11. What do more orthodox instances of theology in the vernacular, or simply those existing outside of Arundelian suspicion, tell us about vernacularity? What are the forms and genres associated with vernacular theology, and how are they used? And what role might theology play in the increasing professionalization of vernacular poetics12? The questions raised by disassociating the study of vernacular theology from the censorship of Arundel open the discussion to other consequences of using the vernacular to communicate “theological information to an audience”, consequences which require analysis apart from their political immediacy. Using the vernacular to communicate theological information, even to “do theology”, can often mean drawing attention to the ability – or, in the case of the Cloud-author, the inability – of language to access divine wisdom or to bring about personal reformation13. Indeed, the extent to which such matters of literary form interact with theological content still requires much critical attention. It is thus my broader, corrective argument here that the aesthetic and ethical valences of vernacularity demand closer attention, especially when invested with theological import. More particularly, the English lyric sequence of Charles d’Orléans, found in Harley 682, provides a striking instance of the interplay between poetic form and ethical obligations, as its extended narrative juxtaposes the religious notion of contemplation with the attempted lyric project. By situating Charles’s English lyrics within the context of fifteenth-century contemplative theology, we are better able to see how their frequent references to religious solitude mark an internal critique of the moral legitimacy of their vernacular aesthetics.

Even if we are to allow that vernacular theology in late medieval England must now account for a multilingual and decentralized literary environment, the usual critical descriptions emphasize the French duke’s formal ingenuity or sensuous appeal, not his theological rigor14. But considering both the matter of poetic influence as well as an evident personal interest in theology, there are, in fact, good reasons to examine the relationship between theology and Charles’s poetic corpus. Specifically, the fifteenth century saw a newly charged investment in the theological significance of Boethian poetics, and I would like to suggest that Charles’s English sequence provides a commentary on this larger religious turn. Moreover, the codicological efforts of Gilbert Ouy have drawn attention to the “période d’intense activité spirituelle” which characterized the duke’s twenty-five year captivity in England, yet there has been little thought given to the way theological interests may have surfaced in his vernacular works15.

Ouy’s extensive research presents a useful point of comparison for the Harleian poems: the Canticum Amoris found in one of Charles’s personal notebooks (BnF ms. lat. 1203)16. This Latin devotional poem, patterned on a Victorine model of ascent towards mystical contemplation, reflects the theological potential signaled within the duke’s English book, which, like the Canticum Amoris, expresses a desire to be understood as “contemplatijf”17. But where the Latin lyric confidently displays a distinct

level of ingenuity in its engagement with contemplative theology, the vernacular sequence breaks down after summoning the possibility of “contemplatijf” poetics. Ultimately, the generic and formal constraints assumed by the vernacular composition make its theological aspirations nearly absurd. In its failed attempt to inscribe itself within the religious life of solitude, Charles’s English production undermines its own aesthetic insularity, while at the same time delimiting the extent to which a vernacular courtly poetics might satisfactorily appropriate the self-sustaining model of spiritual contemplation.

With what follows, I chart how the language of religious solitude provides a locus for the Harleian sequence’s engagement with the moral and ethical implications of aesthetic practice. As the frame narrative moves away from a traditional epistolary relationship, the theological resonances of the speaker’s solitary condition intensify, and this intensification reflects a growing concern for poetic legitimacy. Detached from the usual expectations furnished by a traditional love narrative – the stimulated but unfulfilled desire that incites a constant need for more poetry – the sequence explores possibilities for poetic innovation through its various formal transitions. As Mary-Jo Arn has suggested, the two most prominent fixed forms, the ballade and the roundel, each come to represent a distinct compositional practice: the ballade exhibiting a traditional love narrative, and the roundel signifying a novel departure from this tradition18. As it turns out, however, the allure of novelty does not suffice as a compositional warrant. At a pivotal moment in the work’s narrative, Venus arrives to challenge the speaker’s new lyric mode, one that no longer can claim the goddess’s license. While this moment is usually understood exclusively as the return of erotic desire within the speaker, Venus’s appearance can also be understood as a metacommunicative gesture demanding an ethical affiliation to the poetic process19. The speaker’s attempts to characterize his situation

as that of an anchorite and his lyrics as the products of contemplation disclose an aesthetic desire to identify an ethically legitimate ground for lyric innovation apart from the traditional epistolary form.

“Lo nys hit contemplatijf?”

Perhaps the most distinguishing structural feature of the English poems found in Harley 682, when compared with their French counterparts, is the inclusion of the elaborate narrative section in which Venus appears to the speaker in a dream in order to interrogate him about how he has been occupied since departing her service20. The speaker, nearly despairing, signals his reclusive lifestyle, asking, “Lo nys hit contemplatijf?”21. Venus’s reply is curt (“No, certis”), and the goddess quickly proceeds to incite the speaker’s return to amatory pursuit (v. 4864-4865)22. While the extended comic exchange which includes this arresting moment has attracted much commentary, the speaker’s peculiar language of religious solitude is often left unexamined. Not only does the speaker claim a “contemplatijf” justification for his works and attempt to portray himself “as an ancre” (v. 4802)23, he later goes so far as to address a complaint to an actual anchorite. Taken individually, these forays into the discourse of religious solitude may appear to be simply a perfunctory extension of the long-established interdependencies of courtly and religious verse. But, as Barbara Newman has demonstrated,

such borrowings very often comprise theoretical experiments, whether reinterpreting the theological conception of love or staking off new terrain for literary composition24. As the Harleian speaker’s desire for a licit reclusiveness unfolds, the anchoritic appeals prove to be more than merely an inventive trope. The language of religious solitude provides instead a pivotal reflection on the moral legitimacy of the non-amatory lyric endeavor. By infelicitously attempting to code an aesthetic process as a means of religious contemplation, the speaker’s conversation with Venus activates an internal critique that questions the work’s increasingly solipsistic poetic practice. Janus-like in scope, the language of religious solitude redefines the value of the roundel collection that preceded it, while inflecting a tonal shift in the ballades that follow.

The tripartite structure of Charles’s English sequence is well known25. In the barest of outlines, it can be described as a kind of formal triptych, with the first and third sections comprised primarily of ballades and the middle section containing mostly roundels. Two sections of narrative verse could then be said to form the “hinges” connecting three lyric “panels”. To an extent, this metaphor is apt. The aggregate nature of the lyric sections, paired with the changes in lyric type, reinforces the sense that each section of the larger work exists separately as a distinct unit. Indeed, the number of lyrics amassed seems at times to encourage a narrative stasis, most dramatically in the central series of roundels. But a much more dynamic picture emerges overall on account of the narrative movement expressed within and across the entire mixed form sequence, simultaneously foregrounding and resisting the aggregation of non-narrative lyrics. Even the miscellaneous accumulation of roundels in the work’s second part is redirected towards narrative significance when set in contrast to the surrounding ballades. More precisely, its significance changes from representing a poetic act having social value to one lacking any identifiable meaning. Where the roundels are at first glance identified as a banquet of the “swettist mete” (v. 3120), intended to be both edifying – “sum thing y trust in this bok is / To fede them on” (v. 3128-3129)26 – and painstakingly crafted – “with laboure y haue it

for hem bought” (v. 3132)27 – the extended verse narrative which follows recoils from this initial optimism, demanding a more socially-accepted orientation for this poetic “laboure”.

The optimism that inspires the lyric banquet hopes to accompany a revitalized approach to the act of lyric composition, one that does not depend on the usual love narratives. “And for folk say ‘short song is good in ale’ / That is the cause in rundell y hem write” (v. 3118-3119)28. By introducing a change in form, the roundels mean to herald a convivial departure from the “grose mete” (v. 3111) of his previous compositions to the “deynte” (v. 3110) of “short song”29. The new form promises light-hearted concision and temporal brevity, no longer wedded to the sustained narrative of the first ballade sequence. There, the narrative tracked along the conventional trajectory between lover and lady. As might be expected, we find in the work’s first ballade series the vicissitudes of fortune and the lady’s restraint pitching the speaker to and fro emotionally, while allegorical figures from the Roman de la rose tradition (e.g., “Daunger”) appear at times to discourage the relationship. But the sudden death of the lady provokes a surprising twist to a familiar story. Confronted by Old Age, the speaker sheds his servitude to the God of Love and retreats to the Castle of No Care. The “Iewbile” (v. 3104), or celebration banquet, that the speaker commences after an unspecified amount of time attempts to reboot a poetic practice left dormant (v. 3046-3047)30. This time, no longer originating out of devotion to a particular lady, the series of roundels that follow are framed as a way to continue the lyric vocation without amatory incentive. Indeed, the separateness of the endeavor from the usual affiliations even forces the speaker to speak apologetically for his novelty:

The speche of loue so fresshely depaynt is

With Plesere, where loue settis hertily

That ay from fresshe to fresshe them aquayntis

To speke for that as doth vnto them ly,

For when that y was in ther company

I for my silf gan fast seche wordis gay –

And fond them well – that now ly in decay

(So haue y them forspent), y wot not whare,

And, tho that are bileft me oon or tay,

Mi tunge hem wrestith fer out of aray,

Forwhi y fynde him rollid in No Care.

But here y make my Newbie or y day,

To doon louers for my sowle to pray. (v. 3093-3105)31

Though the project forebodes greater difficulty without recourse to the “speche of loue” which moves “from fresshe to fresshe”, the speaker chances it, believing that this new turn will yet maintain the celebratory exuberance invested in his naming it a “Iewbile”32. No longer part of the “company” of lovers, he ventures forward, forging an uncharted approach to poetic practice.

The new compositional territory embarked upon not only ushers in a new lyric form in its use of the roundel, it also provokes a breakdown of narrative altogether. Critics have regularly commented on the miscellaneous complexion of the work’s second lyric grouping, and the internal circularity of the roundel itself threatens to isolate the individual lyrics from external narrative context33. Codicological evidence further supports the fact that, in presentation, these roundels are recorded as “simply a collection of lyrics”34. At first, the roundels may

appear to present a nostalgic retelling of his past love: where the initial entry states the speaker’s disinclination to follow Love’s “nyse conseitis” (v. 3139)35, subsequent lyrics soon turn once more to the expected courtly descriptions of the absent lady’s “goodly manere” (v. 3180) and fair looks. But this nascent return to an amatory chronology is almost immediately interrupted, and the majority of the roundels simply proceed one after another without any particular narrative pattern36. No longer tracing a precise relationship between the speaker and his lady, the sequence becomes preoccupied with compiling thematic variations, an aesthetic act that emphasizes formal practice rather than social affiliation. Such close attention to form does, of course, have its own social implications, as some of the most recent work on the manuscripts of Charles d’Orléans has demonstrated: the coterie interactions that characterize Charles’s poetic practice after his return to France champion a collaborative approach to the lyric manuscript, constantly inviting formal ingenuity37. One of the more remarkable effects of the extended English sequence found in the Harley MS, however, is to question the legitimacy of this kind of poetic practice. With a love narrative no longer in sight, the collection of roundels is judged retroactively to be groundless.

The ethical import of the speaker’s withdrawal from amatory narrative in favor of formal virtuosity becomes clear when Venus confronts the speaker in the subsequent narrative. Venus’s arrival questions the validity of the mere aggregation of lyric, demanding, as it were, a concomitant love narrative. After the conclusion of the “Iewbile”, the suggestion had been that the speaker will continue to write without any personal amatory compunction. He does, in fact, compose a double ballade at the request of a friend on account of his past service to Love. The request comes, as he says, because “y was so moche to Loue biholde /

In my fer afore past dayes olde” (v. 4655-4656)38. But while his former association with Love may still be remembered by his acquaintances, a personal desire no longer incites his verse making. The only explanation the speaker gives for this favor is that “it must nede be doon, as wot yow what” (v. 4675)39. Without personal incentive, lyric composition becomes vaguely obligatory, without a precise aim. Unable to sustain the initial enthusiasm that had initiated the banquet of roundels, the speaker ends up “musyng in…wakyng dremys sad” (v. 4640)40, occupied only by “ydill thought” (v. 4641)41. The subsequent turn to the literary convention of the sleeping poet and the dream sequence further implies that the speaker has come to a point where his situation must change.

As in many dits amoureux, the lengthy dream sequence that follows the series of roundels comes at a moment of crisis: the ex-lover has reached an emotional dead-end, and his desperate situation is altered by a dream. The nature of this, the work’s second and more elaborate, oneiric excursus has been explored within the context of medieval dream theory by A. C. Spearing, who argues that “it may be prophetic and it may bring him into contact with powers outside himself, but at the same time it is open to interpretation as a bodily symptom signifying what his body demands”42. Venus’s claims on the dreamer support Spearing’s suggestion, since she identifies him as “a man” who “haue of nature als yowre lymys goode” (v. 4869-4870)43. I would add that, as an argument explaining the speaker’s return to amorous pursuit, Venus’s statements must also be supplemented by the speaker’s own failed attempts to justify his new “professioun” (v. 4803, 4863, 4855). After the speaker finally recognizes the goddess, Venus questions him: “how lede ye yowre lijf? Good, lete vs see” (v. 4801)44. His answer, “As an ancre, Madame, in clothis blake” (v. 4802)45, simultaneously follows and thwarts the expectations set by Chaucerian dream-poems. In light of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, black garments might conjure the

image of the lamenting Black Knight, who similarly lost his lady to Death. But this dreamer’s description of his own appearance relies on an entirely different set of iconography, which he uses to make a more stirring, certainly a more inventive, justification for his recent poetic practice. In an effort to authenticate his isolated existence, he concludes by repeating his self-identification as an anchorite: “Thus haue y told yow my poore ancre lijf / And what professioun that y am to bounde. / How thenke ye lo nys hit contemplatijf?” (v. 4862-4864)46.

Before the authoritative gaze of Venus, the speaker is incited to define the aims of his new “professioun”. The unaffiliated lyric practice attempted in his series of roundel does not suffice, so he posits a “contemplatijf” basis in order to justify himself. But Venus’s firm negation of this religious definition is abrupt, even comic, in contrast to the earnest despair of the speaker. Without contemplative justification, he serves no purpose except to “bete þe ground / As that y goo” (v. 4866-4867)47. This aimless pacing provides a vibrant image of the speaker’s unattached solitude, confirming Venus’s assessment: though his appearance might identify his condition with that of a religious recluse, his lack of stability is more characteristic of the wandering hermits whose moral worth was considered, at best, questionable48.

The vita contemplativa posited by the speaker at this pivotal moment extends a set of eremitic metaphors first expressed in the earlier ballade series. On their own, these metaphors (which can also be found in the English’s French counterparts) provide a vehicle for a fairly conventional expression of passive submission to Fortune’s inconstancy. The speaker, for instance, promises no longer to expect Fortune’s favor: “y withdrawe from euery gladsom feere, / For woofull folke they doon but comberaunce. / In thought a reklewsse thus leue y and prayere” (v. 1501-1503)49. Here,

the vow to become a recluse “in thought” emerges as a hedge against overblown expectations or reckless hubris. This submissive posturing not only acknowledges the greater power of Fortune, it also fashions the lover as an object of pity. He means, in fact, to present the “poore balade” to his lady in hopes of winning her favor (v. 1506).

An even more desperate version of the eremitic metaphor appears in the subsequent ballade, where the speaker’s hapless situation is illustrated in starker terms: “My poore hert bicomen is hermyte / In hermytage of Thoughtfull Fantase” (v. 1511-1512)50. A forced reclusion on account of “false Fortune, so full of gret dispite” (v. 1513)51, this image of eremitism again is presented to the lady in an effort obtaining her “grace” (v. 1544-1547). In both of these examples taken from the first ballade series, religious solitude is figured as a pitiful estate analogous to the lover’s uncertain condition. Yet, the effect of the speaker’s claim to a contemplative “professioun”, found only in the extended narrative passage unique to the English sequence, is quite different. The speaker’s confrontation with Venus proves to be a turning point in the English text, and the claim to be “contemplatijf” moves beyond the eremitic conceits of the earlier ballades by providing a self-reflective critique of the poetic autonomy suggested by the roundel sequence. As a commentary on the roundels’ unaffiliated aestheticism, the language of religious solitude reveals the speaker’s need to identify his poetic compositions with ethical purpose, whether this purpose be erotic or religious.

Boethian Re-Fashioning
and the Vita Contemplativa

By characterizing his “professioun” as “contemplatijf”, the speaker momentarily chooses a non-amatory basis for his lyric practice, where initially this practice depended exclusively on the socio-political backing of the courtly tradition. His choice is significant: divorced from its original erotic context, the speaker assumes that he must have religious

authentication in order for his lyrics to be considered valid. Personal entertainment, formal virtuosity – these justifications do not present themselves as adequate grounds for the poet. The idea of poetry that is forwarded depends, for him, upon an ethical orientation, defined either in courtly or religious terms. Having quit Love’s service, making his “bond be rent” (v. 2892), the speaker finds himself unaffiliated, unmoored from any meaningful attachment: “dwelle y so lijk as a masid man / That hath a bidyng and wot not where” (v. 4814-4815)52. An unsatisfying effort to provide advice to his fellow banqueters serves to highlight the fact that the only legitimate way the speaker can find to account for his isolated existence outside of courtly practice is religious asceticism:

Now felle me when þis Iubile þus was made

Not kowde y ellis but wandir vp & downe

Musyng in my wakyng dremys sad.

Myn ydill thought so besy gan me rowne

That alle the hertis dwellyng in a towne

Ne nad (no, no) so small to doon as y,

For in No Care thus lyvid y, wot ye whi. (v. 4638-4644)53

This description of this restless state as a kind of “wakyng dremys” parallels the language used by Bernard of Clairvaux to describe the monastic life54, anticipating the conversation with Venus where the speaker makes the connection more explicit through direct reference to contemplation. Even the “ydil thought” here suggests the sin of acedia, a vice particularly threatening to monastic otium55. Given the passage’s monastic inflections, one might even expect a kind of religious conversion to intervene and to redirect the narrative towards more explicitly moral conclusions. But despite the speaker’s “esy lif” (v. 4649), he finds that of “alle the hertis dwellyng in a towne / Ne nad (no, no) so small to doon as y”. His otium is

not the negotiosissimum otium of monastic reclusion56. Nor is it Augustine’s otium sanctum that enables the search for truth (caritas veritatis)57. At a pivotal moment of recognition, Venus’s rebuttal to the speaker’s monastic suggestion exposes the speaker’s confused desires: “Ye do yowre silf confound!” (v. 4865)58. The fact that Venus is successful in her objection exposes a limitation in the speaker’s poetic practice: the solitary kind of lyric he attempts can in no way be identified as contemplative. The only recourse available to the speaker, then, is to return to his former bond.

If the speaker’s wish to label his lyric as the product of a contemplative existence signals a need for ethical affiliation to legitimize his work, Venus’s successful refusal of the speaker’s religious identification marks a distinct posture taken by the poems of Harley 682 towards the tradition that believes this conversion viable. As the language of religious contemplation suggests, the isolation of the speaker after his lady’s death could possibly initiate a search for metaphysical, rather than physical, consolation. The most famous instance of this psychological trajectory would, of course, be Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a text that exerts an undeniable influence on Charles’s poetry. One novelty of the Harleian sequence, though, is to turn a Christianized reading of Boethius on its head. Much like Lady Philosophy in the Consolation, Venus challenges a solitary writer whose lyric compositions have become misguided. But where Lady Philosophy famously banishes the Muses, who only encourage a self-pitying form of lament, in order that she might redirect the narrator to her more transcendent songs, Venus requires that the narrator pursue physical appetites through the traditional epistolary means. In the Love Goddess’s domain, amorous impulses provide the only true ethical imprimatur. The fact that Venus’s case triumphs so conclusively over the speaker’s feeble claims for “contemplatijf” lyric may in fact express a discomfort with the increasingly theological versions of Boethian poetics. As fifteenth-century Boethian poetics capitalized more and more on the devotional implications of the Consolation, the poems of Harley 682 display a significant reluctance to assimilate this Boethian devotionalism as a means to justify a non-epistolary form of lyric composition.

Such hesitancy was by no means universal. By the fifteenth century, Boethius’s most widely read work had morphed into a variety of literary styles, from scholastic commentaries to illustrated love poems. In many of these interpretations, the appeals of Lady Philosophy modulated towards a more explicitly theological key, particularly through recourse to contemplative theology. Of the earliest surviving vernacular versions of the Consolation, the Old Provençal Boeci has been described as an “elaborate allegory of moral-spiritual ascent” that has “no counterpoint in either the Consolation itself or the commentary tradition”59, suggesting that the spiritualized interpretations that make up a large part of later versions of Boethius’s work inhabit relatively new territory. But if the Provençal version represents an isolated phenomenon in the eleventh century, during the years of Charles’s imprisonment devotional rewritings of Boethius’s text flourished as an alternative to the socio-political demands of courtly composition. Sylvia Huot has, for instance, demonstrated how Alain Chartier reworks the classic Boethian narrative with an “overtly Christian, rather than philosophical, message” in his late work, Le Livre de l’Esperance, written in 143060. For Chartier, the Boethian narrative of the isolated writer instigates “a movement away from the courtly poetry of his earlier career”, and Esperance substitutes, in Huot’s reading, a truly consolatory devotional lyric in the stead of the love songs of youth61. Consolation is thus made possible by the Christian theological content invested in the form of lyric. Contrasted with the impermanent expressions of amorous desire, religious lyric provides lasting respite from the “mental deterioration” recorded in the work’s prose sections62. Douglas Kelly’s separate treatment of Chartier’s work confirms Huot’s reading and points to other late medieval writers, like Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson, who likewise read and rewrite Boethius in explicitly theological terms63. By turning to sources of prayer and religious contemplation, late medieval writers augment what

Kelly calls the “Boethian model”, thereby uncovering a possible source for poetic invigoration. The fact that a writer like Chartier wishes to progress beyond a defunct form of courtly love lyric does not mean that poetry itself must be relinquished. Rather, “it is in devotional lyric that Chartier finds the combination of sweetness, pleasure, and edification that Boethius attributes to Philosophy’s songs”64.

If Boethius’s platonic gestures toward metaphysical truth readily served Christian rewritings, despite noted hiccups, such as Boethius’s problematic notion of the “world soul,” the devotional appeal of the Consolation can be located in the way its numerous translations from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries employ a Latinate vocabulary rich with devotional implication. It is well known that vernacular translators of the Consolation of Philosophy regularly embed the explanatory glosses from their Latin sources into their translations, often with significant variations65. Less acknowledged, though, is the way these vernacular works simultaneously reposition the semantic field within the text, moving from a philosophically inflected language to a theologically inflected one. In the famous ekphrasis which details the letters embroidered on Lady Philosophy’s garment, Boethius’s Latin reads, Harum in extremo margine π Grecum, in suppremo margine θ, legebatur intextum66. Later glosses on the Greek letters, however, significantly alter the philosophical terminology of theoria and praxis that the letters originally denoted. Jean de Meun’s vernacular translation of a Latin commentary on the Greek letters thus reads “une letre grezesche, tele [P] qui senefoit la vie active, et pardesus ou plus haut oule une autre letre, tele [T] qui senefioit la vie contemplative”67. Chaucer too conveys this identification into English, translating the same passage: “In the nethereste hem or bordure of thise clothes, men redden ywoven in a Grekissch P (that signifieth the lif actif); and aboven that lettre, in the heieste bordure, a Grekyssh T (that signifieth the lif contemplatif)”68.

The explanatory glosses embedded in these vernacular translations invest the philosophical language implied by the Greek letters with the more religious implications of a Latinate lexis. Most notably, the move from theoria to vernacular versions of the Latin contemplatio, though typical, is not a pure translation without remainder. As Frédéric Nef has expressed in regards to the larger philological tradition of this kind of translation, “While theoria is a concept of philosophical origin, keeping a certain ambiguous ground between theology and philosophy, contemplatio is a concept bound to Latin Christian theology and, more specifically, to one of its subdivisions, spiritual theology”69. Given a theological inflection, the scene detailing Lady Philosophy’s gown does not, in this case, suggest the superiority of philosophical vision; now it reproduces ecclesiastical discussions about the relationship of the vita contemplativa to the vita activa. On this topic, biblical exegetes would point to Jesus’s preference for Mary’s devotion over Martha’s busyness, where Mary, signifying the life of contemplation, chooses the “best part”70. The influential Boethian translations of both Jean de Meun and Chaucer thus transmit a hierarchy which would be primarily understood as a monastic privileging of the contemplative life as spiritually superior to the active. Moreover, it should be remembered that in the fifteenth century the vita contemplativa was not exclusively the reserve of contemplative monastic orders. Personalized devotional practices that circulated in the vernacular made this elite form of devotion increasingly available to lay readers, as figures like Walter Hilton and Nicholas Love applied versions of the monastic contemplative life to popular lay piety well beyond the confines of the monastery71.

The laicization of monastic values, promulgated mainly through late medieval vernacular manuals, helps to explain the devotional tendencies of later Boethian poetics, since, for fifteenth-century lay readers of the Consolation, references to the vita contemplativa would signal a set of religious practices that emphasized interiority and spiritualized reading over externalized monastic rituals. For vernacular poets like Chartier or Christine de Pizan, Boethian devotionalism offered an accessible alternative to the traditional courtly models of epistolary exchange, although, as Daniel Hobbins’s reading of Gerson suggests, the tendency may find its fullest expression in Jean Gerson’s Consolation of Theology, finished in 1418, the most ambitious demonstration of the theological re-fashioning of Boethius for literary purposes72.

What Boethian devotionalism offered to literary practice was an avenue for innovation, since it conceives of a textual dynamic quite different from that of the traditional love lyric. While the epistolary lyric maps onto a relationship of power where the lover must constantly assume a submissive stance, contemplative lyric opens up an opportunity for a more self-sufficient utterance. Placing the poems of Harley 682 within this emergent tradition helps to explain their repeated recourse to anchoritic imagery. In their presumed insularity, the selection of roundels sought the textual freedom that contemplative lyric offered. But where others unhesitatingly appropriated theological material for literary innovation, Charles’s sequence fascinatingly resists this impulse, even though it seems to desire a compositional autonomy. Instead of introducing a suitable substitute for the epistolary practice of courtly love poetry, the speaker’s attempt to justify his lyric practice as “contemplatijf” fails to effect the desired transformation and the poetically conventional demands of Venus prevail.

The rejection is not simply a matter of the duke’s disinclination for religious material. As evidence to the contrary, we might look briefly to the Latin devotional poem, Canticum Amoris, which Charles most likely wrote during the years 1429-1430 in concert with his frequent associations with the Grey Friars of London73. Here, the contemplative life that

the Harleian poems seem so eager to join is given precise expression. Employing the language and sentiment of popular religious lyric (as Ouy describes it, “ce véritable pastiche de poèmes anglais du xiiie siècle”)74, the Canticum Amoris unflinchingly mines the poetic potential of religious contemplation, even as it conspicuously conforms to the linguistic and generic expectations of religious devotion. Patterned after the mystical ascension of a scala perfectionis, its devotional movement occurs in a shift from the outer to the inner life, where the mind and imagination provide the means to follow the spiritual injunction, Contemplare trepidans thronum majestatis75. In its formalized ascent, traversing the visible world of nature upward to a mystical vision of the divine, the Canticum Amoris offers a performative experience –encouraged by repeated direct addresses to the soul– of the act of contemplation that it describes.

Exhibiting direct influence from the thirteenth-century, Anglo-French Franciscan John of Howden, Charles’s Canticum Amoris presents an affective devotionalism that remained popular in fifteenth-century England through the work of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and others76. Its name, too, imitates the particular Canticles-inspired devotional genre practiced by Howden and Rolle, who each wrote their own Canticum Amoris77. But where these writers tend to focus attention on a visual object of meditation, most specifically through lengthy ekphrastic passages about the Passion or the Virgin Mary, Charles’s Canticum traverses quickly through such moments, evincing a greater interest in the broad imaginative survey attempted. Descriptions of fish, birds, beasts, trees, flowers, and fields preoccupy this wider vision (v. 61-108). So do the inner faculties of memory, intellect, and will (v. 109-184). The Passion does provide moments of pause – Ecce Dei Filius (v. 273) – and the suffering of Christ receives some elaboration in order to incite pity – Tui nudum conspice corpus amatoris / Ac procera brachia tensa Salvatoris (v. 290-291)78

– but such individuated moments of vision play relatively minor roles in a wide-ranging view that encompasses the world, the poet’s inner life, and the heavenly realms. Even the adoration of the Virgin, which is central to Howden’s influential Philomena79, appears only briefly as a part of the celestial hierarchy surveyed in Charles’s poem. In his description of the Virgin Mary, we find nothing of the close physical detail provided, for example, in Rolle’s Canticum, similarly influenced by Howden: Fronsque serenissima facit hunc languentem; / Crines auro similes carpunt conquerentem (v. 14-15)80.

Although the devotional topoi most central to this affective tradition do occur in Charles’s poem, the Canticum presses forward in leaps and bounds, more interested in the capacity of the mind to encompass a universal vision than in any particular piece of that vision. Its primary concern seems to be the activity of the mind percurrens lucidas celi mansions (v. 541)81. In tension with this constant movement is the problem of earthly transience, which such contemplative visions are meant to surpass. Movement suggests change, and change would seem to contradict divine permanence:

Anima – heu! – misera, cur infatuaris

Ut quid transitoriis usquam delectaris?

Nonne cum doloribus transeunt amaris

Cuncta temporalia quibus jocundaris? (v. 605-608)82

With orthodox fervor, the passage suggests that the temporalia that entice the soul only lead to sorrow because they will inevitably pass away. The instability of earthly things belies their attractive appearances. As may be expected, heavenly stability counteracts earthly transience, providing the antidote to the inevitable sorrow that mortal life entails:

Ibi semper, anima, mente conversare,

Non cessas ad gloriam illam anelare;

Hinc gemens et lacrimans disce suspirare,

Ad hanc quoque properans jam noli tardare. (v. 617-620)83

This vision of heavenly stability must come simultaneously (jam) with the gemens et lacrimans, since it is to be entertained at all times. The stability implicit in the imperative conversare works with and against the repeated calls to action (non cessas… properans jam noli tardere). Contemplative stillness, the work suggests, requires a paradoxically active energy –a hurried, unceasing effort. The sweeping vision of Charles’s Canticum formally enacts this energetic stability by drawing the imagination through a universalizing depiction of the natural world, the inner life, and heaven. What emerges as the most distinctive theological implication of this Latin devotion is given poetic expression through a formalized attention to the breadth of the imagination. By not settling on a single object of meditation, Charles’s Canticum attributes an exorbitant capaciousness to the contemplative life.

Remarkably, this ability to sublimate the speaker’s restlessness within an act of spiritual contemplation is exactly what Charles’s English sequence declines. Instead, as Arn has stressed, the notion of “stabilnes” becomes co-opted by the inconstancy of Fortune84. Compared with the devotional tactics of the Canticum Amoris, the Harleian work inverts the relationship between stability and transience such that stability is located within transience, rather than the other way around. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this ground of inconstancy appears in the arrival of the speaker’s new love interest. Occurring simultaneously with the speaker’s vision of Fortune, the second lady’s appearance is further accompanied by an unsettled language that revolves almost as quickly as Fortune’s wheel: asked by Venus, “But is hit and yowre lady that ther sit?”85, the speaker replies confusingly, “O yee – O nay, no, nyst – O yes, dowtles!” (v. 5108-5109)86. From the start, the speaker’s “new serving” (v. 5349)87 betrays the uncertainty intrinsic to the amatory relationship, just as it hints at the speaker’s betrayal of his former love. The implication is that the love pursuit provokes a lack of stasis, even

to the point of displacing the object of desire. But where the Canticum repositions transience within devotional stability, validating the poet’s visionary movement, the chiastic inversion of these concepts makes even stability suspect, perversely redefining the term as “fortunes stabilnes”: Fortune’s stability, a constant inconstancy. In the speaker’s return to amatory pursuit, the concept of stability devolves into something lesser, as love’s vacillations are mapped once more in the epistolary ballades that constituted the first part of the larger work. Within the reconstituted frame of the courtly love narrative, formal stability becomes monotony.

Critics have generally observed a tonal shift that characterizes the third lyric series in Charles’s English manuscript. It is “less moving”, “less carefully executed”; it contains “a lack of closure”88. Not to be viewed as an aesthetic flaw, as these critics have rightfully argued, the sense of decline in the sequence’s third part, both formally and tonally, provides an interpretive perspective on the work as a whole. I suggest that we can account for this “lesser” section by recognizing it as the formalized aftermath of a failed attempt to revitalize the lyric project. Such a reading does not require the equation of the speaker with the poet, but it does not exclude this association either. What becomes clear in this reading is that the practice of poetry is a central concern for the work as a whole, as its tripartite structure plays out a heuristic exploration of the possibilities available to courtly lyric. Having expressed a desire to depart from the traditional model of amatory pursuit, the speaker fails to locate another convincing option, so he returns, almost half-heartedly, to the same form of epistolary love relationship of the sequence’s first part. The appeals of contemplative theology appear, in this reading, as a desire for a new kind of poetic practice.

Even as the sequence moves into its final phase, there remains a final trace of this desire for a poetics revitalized by contemplative theology. Lamenting the inability to stabilize his lyric project, the speaker compares his condition once more to that of an anchorite. But rather than identifying himself “as an ancre”, this time the speaker addresses an anonymous anchorite as a “thou”, cementing the difference between his life of instability and the recluse’s stillness:

O Sely Ankir, that in thi selle

Iclosid art with stoon and gost not out,

Thou maist ben gladder so forto dwelle

Then y with wanton wandryng þus abowt

That haue me pikid amongis þe rowt

An endles woo withouten recomfort,

That of my poore lijf y stonde in dowt.

Go, dul complaynt, my lady þis report.

The anker hath no more him forto greue

Then sool alone vpon the wallis stare,

But, welaway, y stonde in more myscheef,

For he hath helthe and y of helthe am bare,

And more and more when y come where þer are

Of fayre folkis to se a goodly sort–

A thousand fold that doth encrese my care.

Go, dull complaynt, my lady þis report.

It doth me thynke, Yondir is fayre of face,

But, what, more fayre yet is my ladi dere.

Yond on is small, and yonde straight sides has;

Her foot is lite, and she hath eyen clere,

But all ther staynyd my lady, were she here.

Thus thynke y, lo, which doth me discomfort,

Not for the sight but for y nare hir nere.

Go, dull complaynt, my lady þis report.

Wo worthe them wich þat raft me hir presence!

Wo worth the tyme to y to hir resort!

Wo worthies me to be thus in absence!

Go, dull complaynt, my lady þis report! (v. 5784-5811)89

Contrasting his estate with the anchorite’s, the speaker asserts that the religious figure is the happier of the two, even though the recluse

must remain in one place, “Iclosid… with stoon”. The physical barrier that prevents the anchorite from living within the world ultimately proves to be a blessing, providing a stability that the speaker’s own “wanton wandryng” lacks. The anchorite’s changelessness thus defies any potential negative connotations of the adjective “sely” – simplicity suddenly appears attractive. Formally, a single a-rhyme on “selle” and “dwelle” distinguishes the anchorite from the cacophonous world, highlighting the authenticity of dwelling in a single location, while an extended b-rhyme, which holds its resonance down to the penultimate line of the stanza, emphasizes a publicness in its first three rhymes (“out”, “abowt”, “rowt”) that the concluding rhyme, “dowt”, invests with a negative ambiguity. The free mobility that the speaker’s active life allows pales in comparison to the authenticity of anchorite’s dwelling.

Returning once again to the monotonous instability of the epistolary love narrative, the speaker can find no way to attain the moral – and, consequently, the compositional – rejuvenation suggested in a work like Chartier’s Livre de l’Esperance. Instead, he approaches despair, uttering one of his most strident sets of curses in the entire work (“Wo worthe them wich þat raft me hir presence! / Wo worth the tyme to y to hir resort! / Wo worthis me to be thus in absence!”). Even the ballade’s dreary refrain reflects a moral instability (“Go dul complaynt my lady þis report”), as the imperative “Go” contrasts with the anchorite who “gost not out”. The lyric’s own mobilization betrays a culpable association with the speaker’s “wanton wandryng”. The “dul complaint” assumes the repetitive drudgery of merely reporting the speaker’s miserable situation, a constant motion fraught with communicative difficulty. In pronounced contrast, the anchorite does not attempt any such utterances; he “hath no more him forto greue / Than sool alone vpon the wallis stare”. The silence of the anchorite reproves and diminishes the lyric endeavor that leaves the speaker “bare” of health. The speaker remains stuck in a fruitless compositional cycle, reiterating amatory platitudes bereft of precise meaning: (“Yondir is fayre of face”, “Yond on is small”, “yonde straight sides has”).

As this ballade makes clear, the life of solitude continues to entice, even after the return to the social form of epistolary lyric has been made. So the question remains: why does the speaker not resign from the social obligations that make him feel so wretched? Why does he not at least allow himself a “contemplatijf” poetics? Various psychological reasons

may be hypothesized, but I am suggesting that this refusal may be seen as the poet’s metacommunicative concern for aesthetic propriety. If by the fifteenth century Boethian carceral poetics had come to suggest a means to lay spiritual ascent as well as a revitalized lyric practice, such possibilities are lacking here. Charles’s English sequence shows itself to be aware of its theological potential, yet its Boethianism remains stringently secularized and amatory. As a commentary on the Boethian devotionalism of its day, the poems of Harley 682 cast a skeptical eye on the courtly appropriation of theological material. Yet if we are to assume the Canticum Amoris to be a product of the same mind that crafted the English sequence, we must not discount the poet’s willingness to engage in theological speculation. The difference tellingly occurs along linguistic lines, even at a time when theological invention in the vernacular could claim numerous precedents. As a vernacular theologian, or at least as a theorist of vernacular theology, Charles d’Orléans may thus be more readily aligned with the linguistic reservations of the Cloud-author than with the lyric optimism of Richard Rolle. What theological information the Harleian sequence transmits comes in negation: a wary rejection of the possibility for courtly vernacular lyric to provide any kind of spiritual consolation.

It is worth noting, finally, that this rejection of contemplative theology as an ars poetica is nevertheless furnished with dramatic expression. While Charles’s vernacular composition fails to assume the theological bravado of the Latin, its formal development relies upon a theological negation, so what may seem at first to be merely a conservative theological position – that theological language in vernacular poetry is, at best, awkwardly appropriated, if not misleading – becomes an important part of the sequence’s subsequent unfolding. Its central thematic concerns of stability, consolation, and the intersection of art and life emanate from its extended performance of a compositional impasse. The religious life of solitude may not provide a fitting expression of the life of the vernacular poet, but it seems that debating the legitimacy of a contemplative vernacular poetics can.

Gabriel Haley

Concordia University

Nebraska