MA PhD (Dublin), FSA, FRHistS. Former Associate Professor in Medieval and Renaissance Literature and Language and Co-director of the Medieval Research Centre, University of Leicester. Visiting Fellow, School of English, Trinity College Dublin. Anne Marie D'Arcy specializes in later Medieval and early Renaissance texts and their contexts, and James Joyce. Her research interests lie in the areas of Medieval and Renaissance Wisdom literature, medieval and Renaissance iconology and political theology, and Modernism. Supervisors: J.D. Pheifer; V. J. Scattergood
See Robert Cremins, ‘Water World’, Los Angeles Review of Books 30 March 2014 https://lareviewofbo... more See Robert Cremins, ‘Water World’, Los Angeles Review of Books 30 March 2014 https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/water-world.
While previous studies of Leopold Bloom’s relationship with Freemasonry have approached the topic... more While previous studies of Leopold Bloom’s relationship with Freemasonry have approached the topic quite generally, this article examines Joyce’s precise deployment of Masonic terminology, with particular reference to the Grand Lodge of Ireland and the higher or additional degrees and orders of Irish Freemasonry affiliated to it. It also considers the portrayal of Bloom in the light of judeo-maconnerie, reanimated in fin-de-siecle France by Leo Taxil, albeit culminating in the Affaire des Fiches of 1904–1905. Joyce depicts Bloom as an erstwhile Freemason, employing disguised symbolism to suggest he remains faithful to the fraternal ideal of Freemasonry, and its charitable traditions, in spite of the social hierarchies of contemporary Irish Freemasonry and his unaffiliated status. That Bloom is no longer affiliated to a lodge does not ameliorate the hostility directed toward him as a Jewish Freemason, indicative of the pernicious influence of judeo-maconnerie, not only in France, but also in contemporary Ireland. Subsequent to the publication of Victor Hugo’s Les travailleurs de la mer in 1866, the principal symbol of this putative alliance between Jews and Freemasons is a monstrous, blood-sucking octopus, sometimes envisioned with two heads. Although Bloom does not comprehend AE’s cryptic allusion to this symbol, ironically, he remains the living embodiment of judeo-maconnerie as far as some of his fellow Irishmen are concerned.
<p>This essay examines the legal contexts surrounding the protests against Queen Victoria&#... more <p>This essay examines the legal contexts surrounding the protests against Queen Victoria's Ireland visit in 1900, referred to repeatedly in James Joyce's writing, notably in "Island of Saints and Sages" and in Leopold Bloom's internal monologue in <italic>Ulysses.</italic> The essay recounts how Maude Gonne wrote a scathing article about the royal visit,"The Famine Queen," for <italic>The United Irishmen</italic>, which was immediately suppressed over concerns of sedition. This in turn led to Gonne's criminal libel case, for which Arthur Griffith's testimony against Ramsay Colles, publisher and editor of <italic>The</italic><italic>Irish Figaro</italic>, was crucial, D'arcy locates hitherto overlooked references to these developments all over <italic>Ulysses </italic>and the<italic>Wake</italic>.</p>
... Authors: D&#x27;Arcy, Anne Marie. Issue Date: 2005. Citation: Studies in late medieval an... more ... Authors: D&#x27;Arcy, Anne Marie. Issue Date: 2005. Citation: Studies in late medieval and early Renaissance texts in honour of John Scattergood : &#x27;The key of all good remembrance&#x27; / AnneMarie D&#x27;Arcy &amp; Alan J. Fletcher, editors, pp. 100-120. Published by Four Courts, 2005. ...
See Robert Cremins, ‘Water World’, Los Angeles Review of Books 30 March 2014 https://lareviewofbo... more See Robert Cremins, ‘Water World’, Los Angeles Review of Books 30 March 2014 https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/water-world.
While previous studies of Leopold Bloom’s relationship with Freemasonry have approached the topic... more While previous studies of Leopold Bloom’s relationship with Freemasonry have approached the topic quite generally, this article examines Joyce’s precise deployment of Masonic terminology, with particular reference to the Grand Lodge of Ireland and the higher or additional degrees and orders of Irish Freemasonry affiliated to it. It also considers the portrayal of Bloom in the light of judeo-maconnerie, reanimated in fin-de-siecle France by Leo Taxil, albeit culminating in the Affaire des Fiches of 1904–1905. Joyce depicts Bloom as an erstwhile Freemason, employing disguised symbolism to suggest he remains faithful to the fraternal ideal of Freemasonry, and its charitable traditions, in spite of the social hierarchies of contemporary Irish Freemasonry and his unaffiliated status. That Bloom is no longer affiliated to a lodge does not ameliorate the hostility directed toward him as a Jewish Freemason, indicative of the pernicious influence of judeo-maconnerie, not only in France, but also in contemporary Ireland. Subsequent to the publication of Victor Hugo’s Les travailleurs de la mer in 1866, the principal symbol of this putative alliance between Jews and Freemasons is a monstrous, blood-sucking octopus, sometimes envisioned with two heads. Although Bloom does not comprehend AE’s cryptic allusion to this symbol, ironically, he remains the living embodiment of judeo-maconnerie as far as some of his fellow Irishmen are concerned.
<p>This essay examines the legal contexts surrounding the protests against Queen Victoria&#... more <p>This essay examines the legal contexts surrounding the protests against Queen Victoria's Ireland visit in 1900, referred to repeatedly in James Joyce's writing, notably in "Island of Saints and Sages" and in Leopold Bloom's internal monologue in <italic>Ulysses.</italic> The essay recounts how Maude Gonne wrote a scathing article about the royal visit,"The Famine Queen," for <italic>The United Irishmen</italic>, which was immediately suppressed over concerns of sedition. This in turn led to Gonne's criminal libel case, for which Arthur Griffith's testimony against Ramsay Colles, publisher and editor of <italic>The</italic><italic>Irish Figaro</italic>, was crucial, D'arcy locates hitherto overlooked references to these developments all over <italic>Ulysses </italic>and the<italic>Wake</italic>.</p>
... Authors: D&#x27;Arcy, Anne Marie. Issue Date: 2005. Citation: Studies in late medieval an... more ... Authors: D&#x27;Arcy, Anne Marie. Issue Date: 2005. Citation: Studies in late medieval and early Renaissance texts in honour of John Scattergood : &#x27;The key of all good remembrance&#x27; / AnneMarie D&#x27;Arcy &amp; Alan J. Fletcher, editors, pp. 100-120. Published by Four Courts, 2005. ...
This valuable and timely collection reflects a renewed and entirely warranted interest in the Mid... more This valuable and timely collection reflects a renewed and entirely warranted interest in the Middle English lyric. Julia Boffey&#x27;s &#x27;Middle English Lyrics and Manuscripts&#x27; provides an acute and comprehensive overview of the scribal context. She stresses the interpenetration of secular and religious ...
This work examines the influence of Marian theology, spirituality, liturgy, and iconography on a ... more This work examines the influence of Marian theology, spirituality, liturgy, and iconography on a selection of poems from the early thirteenth century (taking the synod of Durham of 1217 as the terminus ad quo) to the first half of the seventeenth (taking the publication of The Doway Catechism by Henry Turberville and the death of Crashaw in 1649 as the terminus ad quem).
James Joyce was a writer in the vanguard of modernism who championed internationalism, yet he als... more James Joyce was a writer in the vanguard of modernism who championed internationalism, yet he also looked back, with Janus-faced pride, to the early centuries of Irish Christian culture and its influence on the development of literature and learning in Britain and on the Continent. This book charts the intimate and vital connections between those two Joyces: the modernist and the medievalist.
It might appear that Aemilia Lanyer challenges the Anglican consensus in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum... more It might appear that Aemilia Lanyer challenges the Anglican consensus in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, because she ascribes the potestas clavium to Margaret Clifford. Although Lanyer accepts the apostle Peter as first subject of the power of the Church, she focusses on the subsequent dispensation of the power of the keys to the entire Church, figured in the title poem by Clifford’s soul, an allegory of Ecclesia as sponsa Christi. This portrait of a soul draws on the Song of Songs and the exegetical concept of Maria Ecclesia, albeit in a distinctly Anglican context. Identified with the Church, Mary is venerated as spiritualis sacerdos, but Lanyer projects Mary’s spiritual priesthood onto Clifford’s soul. Lanyer redeploys Mary’s spiritual priesthood as potentially open to her female readers, in contrast to Mary’s unique sacrifice as spiritualis sacerdos in contemporary Roman Catholic devotion, where her priestly role is specifically associated with her Immaculate Conception.
Piercing the Veil: Der reine Tor, the Grail Quest, and the Language Question in ‘Araby’
Since ... more Piercing the Veil: Der reine Tor, the Grail Quest, and the Language Question in ‘Araby’
Since the mid-nineteenth century, numerous critics have attempted to determine the ultimate source of the grail legend. Perhaps the most influential strand in early critical studies, particularly outside academia, was the Ritual or Anthropological theory of origin, which sometimes flowed into the ‘cultic twalette’ (FW 344.12) of the Celtic or Folkloristic theory. Critics who espoused the Ritual Theory were inspired by the winking lights of J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough, a work which, as T.S. Eliot acknowledged, ‘influenced our generation profoundly’. They suggested that the concept of the grail sprang from the putative rites associated with a vegetation god, typified by such figures as Adonis, Attis and Osiris, who dies each year in the winter only to be ritually revived each spring. This ritual, esoteric theory of the grail was developed by Jessie Weston and W.A. Nitze in his earlier works. In 1909 Nitze published an article called ‘The Fisher King in the Grail Romances’, while in the same year Weston published the concluding part of her Legend of Sir Perceval. Although these two critics worked out their versions of the theory independently, their results agree in the most essential respects.
Much ink has been spilled in libation over Eliot’s use of the Ritual Theory in The Wasteland, and both Stephen and Bloom make several references to its central tenets in Ulysses. Joyce also appropriated aspects of the Ritual Theory in Finnegans Wake, albeit from a sceptically humorous perspective at a time when his steadfast advocate, the great medievalist, Ernst Robert Curtius, still equated the grail quest with the rite of spring: a Geschlectsmysterium through which ‘as through an open sluice, the fertility cult of the earliest ages flows once again into the speculation of the Christian West’. However, this paper highlights Joyce’s essentially Christian concept of the grail in ‘Araby’: as a chalice of unattainable knowledge and unfulfilled desire, and Joyce’s construction of the boy as a type of Perceval, the original grail hero. Here, Joyce draws specifically on the topos of der reine Tor, or le pur simple, which not only defines Perceval in medieval romance from his inception in Le conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes, but also in Wagner’s adaptation of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. In ‘Araby’, the boy is indeed a ‘young reine’ (FW 64.16), and like Perceval he fails in his quest, ‘purely simply’ (FW 241.25) because of his inability to ask the right question before darkness falls on the hall, and the opportunity is lost forever. Moreover, as in the Perceval romances, this inability to pierce the veil, to fulfil the onomastic potential of the grail hero’s name, is rooted in the orientalized locus, and the question of language, or in this instance, the language question. At the close of ‘Araby’, the boy’s eminently medieval anagnoresis involves the sudden recognition of the alien nature of the very words he fails to speak as a ‘purr esimple’ (FW 561.9).
It is difficult to comprehend in retrospect the impact of the Congress on the relationship of chu... more It is difficult to comprehend in retrospect the impact of the Congress on the relationship of church, state and society throughout the thirty-two counties of Ireland. That this occasion was the apotheosis of Irish history, which simultaneously crystallized the Catholic ethos of the Free State, was inculcated into generations of Irish schoolchildren. For many participants, it remained one of the pivotal events of their lives, if not ‘the greatest experience that our race has ever known’. The cultural ideology informing the Congress centred on the fifteenth centenary of Patrick’s mission to Ireland (give or take a year or even a generation in reality), and his legacy of saints and scholars. Throughout the Insular period, from the sixth century to the coming of the Normans in the twelfth, Ireland ‘sent its sons to every country in the world to preach the gospel, and its Doctors to interpret and renew the holy writings’, as Joyce points out in ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’. Joyce’s title echoes insula sanctorum et doctorum: the most famous Latin tag used to describe Ireland throughout Europe during the medieval period, and reanimated in a post-reformation context by such Irish hagiographers and historiographers on the Continent as Geoffrey Keating and the Four Masters. Yet in contrast to Joyce’s diptychal vision of insula sanctorum et doctorum, the saints outflanked the sages at Dublin’s ‘internatural convention’. The official seal of the Congress: a ministral chalice with a triskelion superimposed on ‘the cross of Cong’, and the symbolism of Solemn Pontifical Mass of 26 June 1932, emphasized Ireland’s unbroken covenant with the Insular period. One third of the population of the state, a paradisal host of a million souls descended on the ‘fifteen acres’ to hear mass in the Phoenix Park. Finally, this most contested of imperial spaces, where Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker felt all too comfortable ‘throughout his excellency long vicefreegal existence’, was reclaimed triumphantly as holy ground. Much of the population did believe that ‘We have seen the Island of Saint and Scholar reborn in our midst’.
However, this idea of Saorstát Éireann as ‘Saint Scholarland’ is subjected to unremitting scrutiny in Finnegans Wake. For Joyce, the Book of Kells is the apogee of Insular culture, being ‘the most purely Irish thing we have’, yet not produced in Ireland. Stemming from the spiritual and intellectual impact of the Irish on Britain during the Insular period, it transcends narrow ideas of nationalism in terms of its language, decoration and provenance. This impact extended across Europe, leaving a cultural legacy still acknowledged on the Continent during Joyce’s youth, but written out of British history and folk memory because it belied anti-Irish, colonial propaganda. Joyce was aware of this purposeful excision of ‘monkish learning’, but he was equally wary of the narrow vision of the Insular period propounded by D.P. Moran and Pádraig Pearse, who also disregarded the Irish contribution to British literature and learning. This narrow vision, which ignored the hybridity of Insular culture, dictated the iconography of the Congress, burlesqued in Finnegans Wake. The new Ireland, reanimated by the intellectual confidence of the Insular period envisioned in ‘Saints and Sages’, proved radically different to the state which emerged once the ‘price partitional of twenty six and six’ has been paid.
This paper examines the treatment of leprosy in The Testament of Cresseid in the light of the exe... more This paper examines the treatment of leprosy in The Testament of Cresseid in the light of the exegetical context which informs the poem. While Edwin D. Craun is correct in stating that ‘no one who has written on the Testament has wholly ignored Cresseid’s blasphemous words’, most previous studies have concentrated on the association between her punishment for these sinful words, leprosy, and the sin of lechery. However, I intend to concentrate on the tradition which is synthesized in the contemporary nexus of associations between leprosy, heresy, and blasphemy, suggesting that Nicholas of Lyra’s interpretation of the disease as ‘slander’ provides an interesting analogue and possible source for the exegetical import which Henryson ascribes to it.
The association between lepra and luxuria is a recurrent theme in the medieval exegetical tradition and is found in a number of patristic sources. Leprosy was generally regarded as a punishment for sin, specifically sexual sin: ‘Lepra corporis, luxuriae imago’, as Adam Scotus of Prémontré puts it at the close of the twelfth century. R. I. Moore states that the ‘statutes of leper-houses contain many allegations of their promiscuous inclinations, and of the endeavours of those in authority to restrain them ... The regular prohibitions of the admission of lepers to brothels are the clearest statement of the belief that the disease was sexually transmitted, and since syphilis was one of the diseases that went under the name of lepra this conviction was, of course, well founded in fact.’ Indeed, at least one diagnostic study has been carried out on Creseid’s condition, suggesting that the poem provides a symptomatic delineation of venereal syphilis. Yet, in spite of critical assumptions to the contrary, the association between lepra and luxuria is hardly explicit in the Testament.
However, it would seem that Creseid’s leprosy is divine punishment for her blasphemous heterodoxy. Having being abandoned by Diomeid, ‘lustie Creisseid’ (69) was reputed by some to enter ‘the court, commoun’ (77). The charge carries an implicit association with sexual laxity and the suggestion of prostitution and may account for her ‘wraikfull sentence’ (329) of leprosy. Yet we must also note that previously, ‘Cresseid, hevie in hir intent, | Into the kirk wald not hir self present’ (116-17); she continues to rail against the gods and eventually falls into ‘ane extasie’ (141). Cupid’s discourse suggests that it was Cresseid’s blasphemy, as opposed to the taint of some previous lechery, which caused her leprosy: ‘With sclander and defame injurious: | Thus hir leving unclene and lecherous’ (284-5). The implication is that the generic condition of leprosy itself rather than her supposed past renders her lecherous, and, perhaps, a heretic. This seems to be Cresseid’s own belief: ‘My blaspheming now have I bocht full deir’ (354).
A scriptural precedent for the connection between blasphemy and leprosy is the figure of King Uzziah of Judah (2 Chronicles 26: 16-20), and Miriam was smitten with leprosy for opposing the authority of Moses (Numbers 12: 5-15), which was also interpreted as blasphemy. Throughout the middle ages popular heresiology associated the Jewish people with the emblematic disease of leprosy as well as the more traditional metaphoric condition of caecitas. During the middle ages the charge that the Jews were infected with the plaga leprae was extended to include Christian heretics. As Moore points out: ‘For all imaginative purposes heretics, Jews and lepers were interchangeable … they presented the same threat: through them the Devil was at work to subvert the Christian order and bring the world to chaos.’ Indeed, the Jewish tradition of biblical commentary was invoked by Nicholas of Lyra in support of this claim. Commenting on Leviticus 13: 46 and 14: 4, Rashi specifically states that leprosy ‘comes as a punishment for slander’. This aetiology is reflected in Nicolas’s highly influential interpretation of the disease as the mendacious doctrine of heretics in matters of faith and morals, which gained wide currency in the later middle ages, and may have been known to Henryson.
This paper outlines some iconographic divergences between the treatment of the grail in the thirt... more This paper outlines some iconographic divergences between the treatment of the grail in the thirteenth-century clerkly romance, La Queste del Saint Graal, and its fifteenth-century lay offspring, Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal. It concentrate on three scenes which illustrate Malory’s concept of the grail as a unique yet multivocal relic of Christ’s bloody sacrifice on Calvary and in the Mass.
The explicit of Malory’s Book of Sir Tristram introduces ‘the noble tale off the Sankegreall, whych called ys the holy vessell and the sygnyfycacion of blyssed bloode off oure Lorde Jesu Cryste’. Here he places a particular stress on the sanguis preciosus analogous to contemporary preoccupations in the visual arts. We note the emergence of the motif of the Man of Sorrows in a eucharistic context. This pietistic conception of the naked, suffering God-man and His blood, which flows into a chalice, probably stems from the eucharistically orientated cult of the sanguis preciosus in the fifteenth century. This cult was institutionalized in shrines at several locations on the Continent and, more importantly, in England. Indeed, Malory’s conception of the grail reflects this emphasis on the awe-inspiring and polysemous properties of blood. He read into his vessel religious concepts, which although precious and significant to him, were not authentic to the symbol in the Queste. His conception of the grail as calix sanctus, symbol of the sanguis preciosus, differs considerably from his source. This divergence is apparent from the grail’s initial epiphany at Camelot. The shifting image of the Queste becomes in Malory a constant image of the Mass cup filled with Christ’s blood, which has the power to feed and heal. Malory’s vessel is an explicit depiction of the calix sanctus, divorced from its liturgical context and carried in procession as a devotional object. For Malory, ‘la verité del Saint Graal’, though veiled and inaccessible, is a known truth; it is the Real Presence in the Eucharist sub utraque specie, and needs no further explication. As a late fifteenth-century layman, the Mass cup was denied to him and thus the peculiar awe and reverence which he ascribes to the grail as vessel and symbol of the sanguis preciosus.
The grail’s miraculous, restorative power is also central to Malory’s treatment of the Gaste Chapele episode. The miraculous restoration of the Knight of the Litter is by direct contact with the grail, inconceivable in the Queste. In kissing and touching the sacred vessel, he exercises a privilege which had become exclusive to the priesthood by the fifteenth century. It recalls the eucharistic visions of those lay suppliants of the late middle ages, particularly women, who were in their daily lives denied the chalice, yet by this means claimed roles otherwise prohibited to them. The eucharistic context of the knight’s experience is confirmed by his invocation, ‘Fayre swete Lord whych ys here within the holy vessell.’ Several critics have read this as an affirmation of transubstantiation, but the words, ‘take hede unto me, that I may be hole of thys malody!’ associates them with the Eucharist’s restorative function and popular belief in the healing powers of the sanguis preciosus. The chalice’s healing powers are reaffirmed by the knight’s exclamation, ‘Thorow the holy vessell I am heled.’ These ejaculations are not in the Queste and this association of the grail with healing persists throughout Malory. The blood from the lance is used by Galahad to heal the Maimed King, as foretold in the Booke of Balyne in a passage which identifies it with the sanguis preciosus. Cognate are the healing of Percival and Ector near the end of the Tristram, and the healing of Lancelot himself, which resembles that of the Knight of the Litter. This emphasis on healing recalls the miraculous powers ascribed to the relics of the sanguis preciosus at Westminster, at Ashridge in Buckinghamshire, and particularly at Hailes in Gloucestershire.
The restorative function of actual communion is reaffirmed by the eucharistic miracle experienced by the twelve grail knights at Corbenic, which occurs at the major elevation of the grail ritual, celebrated by the heavenly bishop Joseph. Although the liturgical and theological nuances of the ceremonial that accompanied it in the Queste have been distorted in Malory’s version, the eucharistic miracle itself remains intact: ‘Than loked they and saw a man com oute of the holy vessell that had all the sygnes of the Passion of Jesu Cryste bledynge all opynly.’ This description may be compared to the contemporary motif of the Eucharistic Man of Sorrows, which is relevant to Malory’s concept of the grail, for its special significance is that of the living Christ who actively gives his blood. The figure of Christ makes a solemn declaration of intent to His knights: ‘I woll no lenger cover me frome you, but ye shall se now a parte of my secretes and of my hydde thynges.’ For Malory ‘my secretes’ and ‘my hydde thynges’ indicate the Eucharist simpliciter. Yet the departure from Arthur’s realm of that thing called the grail cannot be synonymous with the withdrawal of the Eucharist. If it were, Lancelot would have died in the Morte Arthur ‘unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d’, as he did not. Rather, Arthur’s people will be disinherited of their most precious relic and its golden reliquary, the prototypal Mass cup, itself a relic. For Malory, the grail is not only the authentic vessel of the cena Domini, but also of the sanguis preciosus preserved in it since the Deposition, and its lamentable, albeit inevitable, departure from earth is treated with due solemnity in the tale that he ‘cronycled for one of the trewyst and of the holyest that ys in thys worlde’.
In the literary tilt yard of Arthurian studies perhaps no area has been so doggedly investigated ... more In the literary tilt yard of Arthurian studies perhaps no area has been so doggedly investigated as the origin and development of the Grail motif. This lecture examines the treatment of the Grail in La Queste del Saint Graal, part of the Old French prose compilation of Arthurian romances known as the Vulgate Cycle, produced in the first third of the thirteenth century. The Vulgate Cycle came to be regarded by later authors as the standard text of the Arthurian narrative. Dante makes reference to it in the Divine Comedy and Thomas Malory translates it into English, calling his translation of La Queste del Saint Graal the Tale of the Sankgreal. In La Queste del Saint Graal, only the virgin knight Galahad, Lancelot’s son by the daughter of the Fisher King, can attain a full vision of the Grail and there has been much scholarly debate as to the exact nature of this vision. Although the author of the Queste is writing in a Cistercian milieu, his work displays a deep understanding of the Christian Neoplatonism associated with the Cathedral School of Chartres in particular. From this perspective, the grail has a fundamentally Christian meaning; it is a vessel of divine enlightenment through which God’s Wisdom is mediated to man. This lecture explores the influence of the apocalyptic text, IV Ezra, which was extremely popular in the Middle Ages, on this sapiential concept. It also outlines how Malory’s interest as a fifteenth-century layman in the cult of the Precious Blood modified the sapiential import of the Grail that he found in his learned, clerical source of over two centuries earlier.
Uploads
Papers by Anne Marie D'Arcy
Since the mid-nineteenth century, numerous critics have attempted to determine the ultimate source of the grail legend. Perhaps the most influential strand in early critical studies, particularly outside academia, was the Ritual or Anthropological theory of origin, which sometimes flowed into the ‘cultic twalette’ (FW 344.12) of the Celtic or Folkloristic theory. Critics who espoused the Ritual Theory were inspired by the winking lights of J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough, a work which, as T.S. Eliot acknowledged, ‘influenced our generation profoundly’. They suggested that the concept of the grail sprang from the putative rites associated with a vegetation god, typified by such figures as Adonis, Attis and Osiris, who dies each year in the winter only to be ritually revived each spring. This ritual, esoteric theory of the grail was developed by Jessie Weston and W.A. Nitze in his earlier works. In 1909 Nitze published an article called ‘The Fisher King in the Grail Romances’, while in the same year Weston published the concluding part of her Legend of Sir Perceval. Although these two critics worked out their versions of the theory independently, their results agree in the most essential respects.
Much ink has been spilled in libation over Eliot’s use of the Ritual Theory in The Wasteland, and both Stephen and Bloom make several references to its central tenets in Ulysses. Joyce also appropriated aspects of the Ritual Theory in Finnegans Wake, albeit from a sceptically humorous perspective at a time when his steadfast advocate, the great medievalist, Ernst Robert Curtius, still equated the grail quest with the rite of spring: a Geschlectsmysterium through which ‘as through an open sluice, the fertility cult of the earliest ages flows once again into the speculation of the Christian West’. However, this paper highlights Joyce’s essentially Christian concept of the grail in ‘Araby’: as a chalice of unattainable knowledge and unfulfilled desire, and Joyce’s construction of the boy as a type of Perceval, the original grail hero. Here, Joyce draws specifically on the topos of der reine Tor, or le pur simple, which not only defines Perceval in medieval romance from his inception in Le conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes, but also in Wagner’s adaptation of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. In ‘Araby’, the boy is indeed a ‘young reine’ (FW 64.16), and like Perceval he fails in his quest, ‘purely simply’ (FW 241.25) because of his inability to ask the right question before darkness falls on the hall, and the opportunity is lost forever. Moreover, as in the Perceval romances, this inability to pierce the veil, to fulfil the onomastic potential of the grail hero’s name, is rooted in the orientalized locus, and the question of language, or in this instance, the language question. At the close of ‘Araby’, the boy’s eminently medieval anagnoresis involves the sudden recognition of the alien nature of the very words he fails to speak as a ‘purr esimple’ (FW 561.9).
However, this idea of Saorstát Éireann as ‘Saint Scholarland’ is subjected to unremitting scrutiny in Finnegans Wake. For Joyce, the Book of Kells is the apogee of Insular culture, being ‘the most purely Irish thing we have’, yet not produced in Ireland. Stemming from the spiritual and intellectual impact of the Irish on Britain during the Insular period, it transcends narrow ideas of nationalism in terms of its language, decoration and provenance. This impact extended across Europe, leaving a cultural legacy still acknowledged on the Continent during Joyce’s youth, but written out of British history and folk memory because it belied anti-Irish, colonial propaganda. Joyce was aware of this purposeful excision of ‘monkish learning’, but he was equally wary of the narrow vision of the Insular period propounded by D.P. Moran and Pádraig Pearse, who also disregarded the Irish contribution to British literature and learning. This narrow vision, which ignored the hybridity of Insular culture, dictated the iconography of the Congress, burlesqued in Finnegans Wake. The new Ireland, reanimated by the intellectual confidence of the Insular period envisioned in ‘Saints and Sages’, proved radically different to the state which emerged once the ‘price partitional of twenty six and six’ has been paid.
The association between lepra and luxuria is a recurrent theme in the medieval exegetical tradition and is found in a number of patristic sources. Leprosy was generally regarded as a punishment for sin, specifically sexual sin: ‘Lepra corporis, luxuriae imago’, as Adam Scotus of Prémontré puts it at the close of the twelfth century. R. I. Moore states that the ‘statutes of leper-houses contain many allegations of their promiscuous inclinations, and of the endeavours of those in authority to restrain them ... The regular prohibitions of the admission of lepers to brothels are the clearest statement of the belief that the disease was sexually transmitted, and since syphilis was one of the diseases that went under the name of lepra this conviction was, of course, well founded in fact.’ Indeed, at least one diagnostic study has been carried out on Creseid’s condition, suggesting that the poem provides a symptomatic delineation of venereal syphilis. Yet, in spite of critical assumptions to the contrary, the association between lepra and luxuria is hardly explicit in the Testament.
However, it would seem that Creseid’s leprosy is divine punishment for her blasphemous heterodoxy. Having being abandoned by Diomeid, ‘lustie Creisseid’ (69) was reputed by some to enter ‘the court, commoun’ (77). The charge carries an implicit association with sexual laxity and the suggestion of prostitution and may account for her ‘wraikfull sentence’ (329) of leprosy. Yet we must also note that previously, ‘Cresseid, hevie in hir intent, | Into the kirk wald not hir self present’ (116-17); she continues to rail against the gods and eventually falls into ‘ane extasie’ (141). Cupid’s discourse suggests that it was Cresseid’s blasphemy, as opposed to the taint of some previous lechery, which caused her leprosy: ‘With sclander and defame injurious: | Thus hir leving unclene and lecherous’ (284-5). The implication is that the generic condition of leprosy itself rather than her supposed past renders her lecherous, and, perhaps, a heretic. This seems to be Cresseid’s own belief: ‘My blaspheming now have I bocht full deir’ (354).
A scriptural precedent for the connection between blasphemy and leprosy is the figure of King Uzziah of Judah (2 Chronicles 26: 16-20), and Miriam was smitten with leprosy for opposing the authority of Moses (Numbers 12: 5-15), which was also interpreted as blasphemy. Throughout the middle ages popular heresiology associated the Jewish people with the emblematic disease of leprosy as well as the more traditional metaphoric condition of caecitas. During the middle ages the charge that the Jews were infected with the plaga leprae was extended to include Christian heretics. As Moore points out: ‘For all imaginative purposes heretics, Jews and lepers were interchangeable … they presented the same threat: through them the Devil was at work to subvert the Christian order and bring the world to chaos.’ Indeed, the Jewish tradition of biblical commentary was invoked by Nicholas of Lyra in support of this claim. Commenting on Leviticus 13: 46 and 14: 4, Rashi specifically states that leprosy ‘comes as a punishment for slander’. This aetiology is reflected in Nicolas’s highly influential interpretation of the disease as the mendacious doctrine of heretics in matters of faith and morals, which gained wide currency in the later middle ages, and may have been known to Henryson.
The explicit of Malory’s Book of Sir Tristram introduces ‘the noble tale off the Sankegreall, whych called ys the holy vessell and the sygnyfycacion of blyssed bloode off oure Lorde Jesu Cryste’. Here he places a particular stress on the sanguis preciosus analogous to contemporary preoccupations in the visual arts. We note the emergence of the motif of the Man of Sorrows in a eucharistic context. This pietistic conception of the naked, suffering God-man and His blood, which flows into a chalice, probably stems from the eucharistically orientated cult of the sanguis preciosus in the fifteenth century. This cult was institutionalized in shrines at several locations on the Continent and, more importantly, in England. Indeed, Malory’s conception of the grail reflects this emphasis on the awe-inspiring and polysemous properties of blood. He read into his vessel religious concepts, which although precious and significant to him, were not authentic to the symbol in the Queste. His conception of the grail as calix sanctus, symbol of the sanguis preciosus, differs considerably from his source. This divergence is apparent from the grail’s initial epiphany at Camelot. The shifting image of the Queste becomes in Malory a constant image of the Mass cup filled with Christ’s blood, which has the power to feed and heal. Malory’s vessel is an explicit depiction of the calix sanctus, divorced from its liturgical context and carried in procession as a devotional object. For Malory, ‘la verité del Saint Graal’, though veiled and inaccessible, is a known truth; it is the Real Presence in the Eucharist sub utraque specie, and needs no further explication. As a late fifteenth-century layman, the Mass cup was denied to him and thus the peculiar awe and reverence which he ascribes to the grail as vessel and symbol of the sanguis preciosus.
The grail’s miraculous, restorative power is also central to Malory’s treatment of the Gaste Chapele episode. The miraculous restoration of the Knight of the Litter is by direct contact with the grail, inconceivable in the Queste. In kissing and touching the sacred vessel, he exercises a privilege which had become exclusive to the priesthood by the fifteenth century. It recalls the eucharistic visions of those lay suppliants of the late middle ages, particularly women, who were in their daily lives denied the chalice, yet by this means claimed roles otherwise prohibited to them. The eucharistic context of the knight’s experience is confirmed by his invocation, ‘Fayre swete Lord whych ys here within the holy vessell.’ Several critics have read this as an affirmation of transubstantiation, but the words, ‘take hede unto me, that I may be hole of thys malody!’ associates them with the Eucharist’s restorative function and popular belief in the healing powers of the sanguis preciosus. The chalice’s healing powers are reaffirmed by the knight’s exclamation, ‘Thorow the holy vessell I am heled.’ These ejaculations are not in the Queste and this association of the grail with healing persists throughout Malory. The blood from the lance is used by Galahad to heal the Maimed King, as foretold in the Booke of Balyne in a passage which identifies it with the sanguis preciosus. Cognate are the healing of Percival and Ector near the end of the Tristram, and the healing of Lancelot himself, which resembles that of the Knight of the Litter. This emphasis on healing recalls the miraculous powers ascribed to the relics of the sanguis preciosus at Westminster, at Ashridge in Buckinghamshire, and particularly at Hailes in Gloucestershire.
The restorative function of actual communion is reaffirmed by the eucharistic miracle experienced by the twelve grail knights at Corbenic, which occurs at the major elevation of the grail ritual, celebrated by the heavenly bishop Joseph. Although the liturgical and theological nuances of the ceremonial that accompanied it in the Queste have been distorted in Malory’s version, the eucharistic miracle itself remains intact: ‘Than loked they and saw a man com oute of the holy vessell that had all the sygnes of the Passion of Jesu Cryste bledynge all opynly.’ This description may be compared to the contemporary motif of the Eucharistic Man of Sorrows, which is relevant to Malory’s concept of the grail, for its special significance is that of the living Christ who actively gives his blood. The figure of Christ makes a solemn declaration of intent to His knights: ‘I woll no lenger cover me frome you, but ye shall se now a parte of my secretes and of my hydde thynges.’ For Malory ‘my secretes’ and ‘my hydde thynges’ indicate the Eucharist simpliciter. Yet the departure from Arthur’s realm of that thing called the grail cannot be synonymous with the withdrawal of the Eucharist. If it were, Lancelot would have died in the Morte Arthur ‘unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d’, as he did not. Rather, Arthur’s people will be disinherited of their most precious relic and its golden reliquary, the prototypal Mass cup, itself a relic. For Malory, the grail is not only the authentic vessel of the cena Domini, but also of the sanguis preciosus preserved in it since the Deposition, and its lamentable, albeit inevitable, departure from earth is treated with due solemnity in the tale that he ‘cronycled for one of the trewyst and of the holyest that ys in thys worlde’.