Marginalia

Sin, confession, penance, and love are intertwining themes in Middle English penitential romances, and the poems Sir Orfeo and The Gast of Gy are no exceptions. They fall clearly into the broad category of 'penitential romance' which Andrea Hopkins has defined: a romance in which, in place of the hero's chivalric virtue being tested, 'his sin is repented of, atoned for, and forgiven;' that is, after the hero has committed his initial sin, he must demonstrate his true repentance, for which he will be in the end rewarded. But these two poems have more in common than a sinful hero and his quest for forgiveness. The king and the ghost who are the titular heroes of these poems engage directly with the religious practices of confession and penance, but they also complicate such concepts by using them to defend their passionate love of their wives.

In Sir Orfeo and The Gast of Gy, the confessional structure is used in two very different ways to achieve a very similar purpose, demonstrating the extent to which the concept had pervaded medieval culture and even the space of the genre of romance. Ad Putter has observed that the very category of 'romance' is 'loose and fuzzy at its edges'; though in general 'romances usually end happily with the restoration of an order that was disrupted at the beginning of the story; the cast is aristocratic, consisting of knights and kings, queens and ladies; the setting is idealized, even supernatural.' But these are broad similarities extrapolated from a very varied genre, whose subdivisions multiply into homiletic romances, society romances, family romances, and penitential romances, to name only a few of the categories Putter lists. These categories are always unstable spaces, 'unbounded and overlapping'; borrowing Wittgenstein's terminology, Putter suggests that 'we should think of them as forming a complex network of relationships and similarities, not as a set that should be defined on the basis of specific properties.'

Using this infinitely more flexible definition of romance, we can reconsider a poem traditionally excluded from the romance genre by means of comparison with one that is traditionally included. In Sir Orfeo, a popular and mainly secular poem with penitential touches, the hero must undergo a ritual of confession and the penance of exile before his wife can be restored to him. In The Gast of Gy, a poem that emphasizes theological explication, the ghostly title character is able to warn his wife to repent of her sins as part of his own penance, making her salvation possible. The former text uses confessional structures implicitly, while the latter delves explicitly into Christian doctrine, but the goal is nevertheless the same: both title characters seek to save their wives, the women they love, and for both, the only means of doing so is through some enactment of confession and penance. In this way the dictates of the Fourth Lateran Council about the importance of confession are upheld - but confession is also used for a purpose perhaps beyond its intended religious one, as it provides a means of preserving the objects of secular, earthly, and passionate love. By means of comparison with Sir Orfeo, we can see that The Gast of Gy is not a simple purgatory poem at all but a type of romance, a type that makes use of the frameworks and structures of theology in order to achieve its secular, romantic aims: a theological romance.

The Fourth Lateran Council imposed new rules and regulations governing the structure and frequency of confession, making it a required and universal practice for all believers. The faithful were told to confess their sins to a qualified parish priest at least once a year, and Mary Flowers Braswell has noted the 'increasing demand for thoroughness' as well as the emphasis on contrition, encompassing both the sorrow a penitent feels for his sins and his resolve to make amends for them. Penitential manuals often carried this concern for thoroughness to the extreme; as Braswell comments, many of them even included the precise words a priest should speak, and a sample of ways a penitent could respond. The act of confession was encouraged in order to show devotion, and the satisfactory performance of penance, the act of making those amends, was a requirement for Christian well-being. The twin concepts became so widespread under these new regulations that they were used as a literary device by authors from Chaucer to Langland, and later to Shakespeare and beyond; confession and penance were now universal, and universally standardized, under the Church. In his book on the confessional subject in medieval literature, Jerry Root points out just how great an impact this new paradigm had on discourse: confession, he says, is the privileged discourse of the self, and to make confession work, the Church had to foster and promote such a discourse. This discourse, emphasizing the self of the sinner, the one who commits the sinful acts, in turn is reflected in the literature of the period, which was now able to draw on the language and concepts of confessional practices to build its subjects.

Sir Orfeo is a romance interested in earthly love and chivalry, and as such it is proper that the focus rests on how confession and penance can reward the remorseful in the secular realm, with the rescue of Sir Orfeo's lady-love. We find similar themes in The Gast of Gy, but in a far more complicated form. The Gast of Gy is an explicitly Christian and theological poem, and its undercurrents of passionately devoted earthly love and individuality exist in an odd tension with its primary concern with purgatorial doctrine. Traditionally read mainly for its emphasis on proper understanding of Purgatory and Church doctrine, the poem's instructional qualities are indeed prominent; in his introduction to the poem (recently presented alongside Sir Owain and The Vision of Tundale in a TEAMS collection named Three Purgatory Poems, an editorial choice that nevertheless perhaps implies a form of categorization), Edward E. Foster observes that the poem relates 'much of the information of a "tract", providing opinions on many topics of debate.' However, he adds that The Gast of Gy is also 'imaginative fiction', and 'give[s] doctrine a powerful human form', thus distinguishing it from the other purgatory poems in the collection. In its emphasis on the power of earthly, human bonds, even after death, the story of the ghost of Gy and his wife appears to have more in common with the values of romances such as Sir Orfeo than with simply instructional tracts.

The poem The Gast of Gy is based roughly on the first-person account by the Dominican Jean Gobi of his encounter with the spirit of Gy in 1323 (De Spiritu Guidonis); it relates the return of the spirit or 'gast' of Gy, a prosperous citizen of Alais, France, who has died and been sent to Purgatory to suffer penance for a sin (never fully explained) that he committed while alive. Gy is (was) not a knight; though a well-off citizen, he is of the bourgeois social class. This difference may reflect the new accessibility of the hero of this type of romance - a man like any other, who will fight as hard as any knight to save his lady, albeit in the spiritual world of the afterlife and not the secular world of the living. The popularity of the poem may also show the success of this accessibly humane figure: The Gast of Gy is known in at least sixty extant versions, prose and poem, and nine languages, counting fragments (thirty-six in Latin, nine in English, six in French, four in German, and one each in Italian, Swedish, Irish, Welsh, and Spanish), and was still being referenced into the early sixteenth century as entertainment for King James V.

As Stephen Greenblatt observes in his investigation of the history of Purgatory, the church is 'massively present' in The Gast of Gy. Foster, in his introduction to the collection, locates the poem in a specific historical moment, claiming that it 'seems at least in part a Dominican attempt to dissuade Pope John XXII from his tendency to relegate judgment on all souls until Doomsday,' something which by this time had become an almost heretical view'. In this light, the poem becomes extremely localized, an intervention in a strictly religious and less than universal moment. Despite Foster's recognition of the importance of the humanity of the tale, this reading seems limiting, privileging the didactic moments of the poem over the moments in which the Gast displays a very secular and passionate attachment to his wife. Foster does note that the narrative 'belongs to the genre of the "ghost story"', defining this genre as 'the tradition of narratives in which spirits return temporarily to this world for their own benefit or to give salutary advice.' This is unarguably true: The Gast of Gy is the story of just such a returned spirit, and he does dispense a great deal of advice. But what sort of advice is it? There is more romantic love than papal scolding in the Gast's quiet avowal that 'I lufed mare my wyfe/ Than any other man on lyfe'. He chooses to return as a spirit not for the purposes of educating the clergy who interrogate him, but to save his wife from the torment he now suffers.

The action of the poem is fairly simple, though the themes are less so. In the course of the tale, the spirit of Gy returns to earth to dwell in his widow's house, specifically in the bedroom they once shared, 'and suede hir with mykell payne'. Unsure whether this visitation is a manifestation of her husband's ghost or a sending of the 'fend' (Devil) to torment her, the widow asks the local friars for aid. Even in her fear, she shows clear love for her husband; when the Prior comes to her home, she asks him to 'byd som haly bede,/ And mak prayers in this stede/ For Gy saule, that noble man'; in other words, to pray for Gy's soul, the soul of a 'noble man' (though not a knight, he is described in knightly terms). Like Heurodis, she loves her husband, before and after his sojourn in the underworld. The Prior himself comes prepared to interrogate the spirit, bringing with him a master of theology, a master of philosophy, and 200 armed men assigned by the mayor for protection - who, just as in Sir Orfeo, prove utterly ineffective.

Much of the poem consists of a patient question-and-answer session between the Prior, who attempts to determine whether the Gast is 'a gude gast or an ill' by quizzing him on theological points; before entering the house, all the deployed men who choose to receive it are given communion, and their confessions heard (here confession is used as a purifying tool, a defense against the evil of a potentially diabolical spirit). To the first question, that of whether he is good or evil, the Gast offers a complex and intelligent answer: he is good, because he is a creation of God, but he is also evil 'after my dede'. God has judged him deserving of punishment, and therefore, though he is good, he is also wicked. Greenblatt observes that this sets the stage for the coming dialogue, in which the ghost proves himself an effective debater, relying on personal experience for his responses, while the Prior is 'repeatedly, even embarrassingly, wrong'. It is true that the Prior is often convinced of the rightness of his position to the exclusion of all other evidence; the Gast of Gy comes across as far more knowledgeable, even if one adopts a more sympathetic reading of the Prior as a man who merely wants to be very sure that the ghost knows whereof he speaks. Foster considers him a 'patient questioner', calling him 'neither the grim inquisitor that some would have him nor an ignorant buffoon in need of serious instruction'. The Prior is indeed neither of the two extremes, and his personal compassion is evident when he prays to help relieve the Gast's suffering. The Gast, however, does continually provide a source of personal and authoritative insight for someone 'genuinely interested in the discovery of the truth from a reliable source'. This privileging of personal experience reflects the trend Jerry Root has observed in medieval literature with the advent of the confessional structure, that of the emergent discourse of the self and the primacy of personal authority.

The Prior asks the ghost to disclose the identities of persons in Heaven and Hell, and whether he knows who might be saved or damned. The ghost responds that he cannot answer, as he is a soul in Purgatory, and 'The saules in Hell may I noght se./ I was never thare ne never sall be./ Ne into Heven may I noght wyn,/ Till I be clensed clene of syn./ Tharfor I may noght sothely say/ Whilk er saved or damned for ay'. A spirit in Purgatory, as the Gast is, knows nothing of the two other realms, either the one he shall never suffer or the one he will attain in future, because he has not experienced them (this locating of the Gast's spirit will become important later). Here again we see the primacy of personal experience, as well as an interesting limiting of perspective. The Prior tries to prove him false by citing the visions of prophets who have seen Hell and Heaven; the Gast patiently points out that he is not a prophet, and has not been given their gift of vision, and therefore he is unable to tell what the Prior wants to know. The Gast is able to discuss only what is pertinent to himself and why he has come; in other words, only that which is pertinent to his quest. The Prior also wishes to know how a creature with no body can suffer in flames; as Greenblatt says, this provides an opportunity for 'predictable, perfectly orthodox answers' from the ghost, displaying the theological exposition that is among the main themes of the poem, and why it is usually classed as a purgatory poem. The Prior continues to ask questions about Purgatory and the extent of the Gast's knowledge, for example: what will most aid a man's salvation (faith in Christ's Passion and repentance for sins), which prayers are most effective (those of Christ's Passion), and whether men can see Mary and Christ (only the most holy). For all these questions and many others the Gast of Gy has a logical answer, his personal experience giving the theology an even greater weight - but the Gast himself, as we later see in his interactions with his wife and the Prior, always chooses to emphasize his loving marital connections over all else. The Gast of Gy is intended to be instructive, but that instruction appears alongside and at times even subordinate to the concern for love, devotion, and protection of order that Putter notes as the elements of romance.

As in Sir Orfeo, the otherworldly elements of The Gast of Gy are quite clear, though here they belong to the theological supernatural space instead of fairyland. The supernatural has been called 'clearly characteristic' of the romance; in many it 'either initiates the action or defines the nature of the action', contributing to a sense of mystery and creating a special atmosphere in which reality and unreality collide, all quests are possible, and perhaps unrealistic ideals can be tested in an unreal world. In Sir Orfeo and The Gast of Gy, we are presented with the supernatural in the form of the underworld. Sir Orfeo's supernatural creatures are fairies, which first visit and then abduct Queen Heurodis; he then journeys into the summer country himself to win her back, immersing himself in the water of the supernatural so that they both can emerge anew. The Gast of Gy's supernatural elements are all theological: the underworld is Purgatory, a place of fiery suffering, and Gy himself is a ghost, who (like the fairy king) figures the intrusion of the otherworld into reality. As in Sir Orfeo, Gy's immersion in the supernatural is required in order for both himself and his wife to be cleansed of the sin they shared. Both romances, then, reflect this important characteristic of the genre, though Gy once again distinguishes itself by making its supernatural elements a depiction of the Christian afterlife, specifically Purgatory.

The doctrine of Purgatory is exceptional in this poem, even in the category of Purgatory poems. It is surprisingly individualized, an innovation that is required in order for the ghost to achieve his desired result from his suffering. The Gast of Gy offers a hopeful view of the afterlife, as the Gast speaks to us from Purgatory; it emphasizes the knowledge of certain salvation, something that will become important for the Gast of Gy's mission. It is significant that the Gast is in Purgatory rather than Hell: he is not condemned, not eternally damned, and will indeed see Heaven. His retaining of secular passion seems thus approved. In her introduction to the prose version of The Gast of Gy in Cultures of Piety, Mona L. Logarbo notes that it 'reveals the contemporary orthodox position concerning the doctrines of sin, forgiveness, and repentance', and also that it belongs to 'the larger contemporary doctrine of popular literature in which church doctrine was translated into the vernacular detail that rendered it both comprehensible and palatable to a popular audience'. The Gast of Gy thus reflects the contemporary concern with both the development of Purgatory as doctrine and with disseminating the knowledge of such doctrine. Purgatory here is a specific place, and there is a 'common' Purgatory in the 'mydes of the erth', yet each person is placed in his specific 'departable' Purgatory after he is judged, an event that takes place immediately after death. The 'departable' Purgatory involves the soul suffering at the place of his sin, undergoing the purifying fire that will cleanse him and allow him to enter Heaven. The ghost's 'departable' Purgatory, the site of his sin, is in the home and specifically the bed he shared with his wife; he must be able to travel there, to where she is, in order to communicate with her, tell her to repent, and thereby save her from the pain he now suffers. The souls also know how long their purification will last and when they will depart for Paradise (the Gast himself names Easter as his departure day). This insider's knowledge allows the Gast to advise the clergy as well as his wife; as Foster points out, he 'present[s] a strong admonition to the clergy to do better at preaching the doctrine of Purgatory and repentance'. The importance of personal knowledge and experience is once again stressed, as it lets the Gast make suggestions for the living; his compassion is also evident, as he desires to aid, if he can, not only his wife but others who can benefit from better instruction about what awaits them. The souls, as related by the Gast of Gy, also understand and accept their punishment as necessary for their improvement; however, the Gast adds, it is better to repent, confess, and be cleansed while living - that way one may escape the purgatorial fires altogether. And that way is what he desires for his wife, the woman who still commands the first impulse of his love, even while he suffers the purgatorial pains that will scour his soul.

The most striking example of the saving power of penance used for secular love occurs in a touching scene fairly late in the poem. The Prior asks the Gast of Gy why, having returned to earth to undergo his purgatorial suffering, he did not come 'Unto men of religioune/ For to tell to tham his lyfe/ Titter than unto his wyfe;/ Sen that he wist thai war mare nere/ To God than any wemen were,/ And mare wisely thai couth him wys'. It would indeed seem logical; the Gast clearly has the leeway to converse with the clergy, and to offer instruction to them about Purgatory and the afterlife, and the clergy perhaps have the power to help him, as we have seen by the power of their prayers to alleviate some of his suffering. The ghost of Gy answers with an eloquent statement of simple love: 'I lufed mare my wyfe/ Than any other man on lyfe,/ And tharfor first to hir I went'. The ghost of Gy, it seems, still values the connection of passionate marital love more than the connection of the clergy to God; and he uses the afterlife to which he has been assigned by God to cling to that connection. Stephen Greenblatt notes that this moment 'is the clearest, most powerful statement in the poem of the primacy of the personal and the intimate'; he goes on to declare that 'the loss of all his worldly possessions, the crossing of the boundary between life and death, the encounter with vengeful fiends, the dismaying recognition of the sins of the flesh, the commencement of unspeakable torments - none of these things has severed his deepest mortal passion'. The Fourth Lateran Council had in fact made marriage a sacrament, thus claiming the conventions of romantic love for spirituality; here we have the inversion of that process, a spiritual framework of penance used for the specific purpose of defending romantic and marital love.

But there is more: the ghost continues, 'when me was gyfen the jugement/ To suffyr penance in this place,/ I asked God of His gret grace/ That my wife myght warned be/ For to amend hir mys bi me'. Even while undergoing the fires of Purgatory, theoretically cleansing his soul for ascent to the pure love of Heaven, when given God's judgment that he must suffer penance - the spirit of Gy thinks first of his wife. Moreover, he uses his purgatorial penance to save her, in much the same spirit as Sir Orfeo seeks to save Heorodis: 'And of His grace He gaf me leve/ On this wise hir for to greve/ And for to turment hir biforne/ So that scho suld noght be lorne,/ Ne that scho suld noght suffyr pyne/ For hir syns, als I do for myne/ Bot do it here in hir lyf days'. In other words, the Gast of Gy is explicitly making use of his purgatorial suffering to warn his wife, so that she can do penance while alive and evade the fires of purgatory after death. Though the tormenting of his wife may look like cruelty, as the Prior remarks and Stephen Greenblatt observes, it 'is in fact the purest expression of his love', because Gy's wife will be spared the terrible suffering of the afterlife as a result. Though the rescue here takes place on the spiritual plane, it is no less real and no less devoted than Sir Orfeo's. Like the knight of the romance, the Gast of Gy knows that his penance will be his wife's salvation. (It is important to note here that God seems to agree with the Gast of Gy, giving him permission to indulge his persistent secular attachment.)

The Gast's concern for his wife, in fact, is one of the most prominent themes of the poem, notably when the piteous suffering of his wife is described. 'Than sone the woman gan bygyn/Grisely for to gnayst and gryn/and cryed loud, als scho war wode,” the poet relates, and “gret sorow thai [the Prior and company] had that syght to se,/for of hir payne was gret pete'. The Prior inquires of the Gast - not the woman herself - why she makes such mourning, and the Gast responds simply, 'Scho wate hirself, als wele as I'. That is, his wife knows the answer just as well as he does, and the Gast will not presume to answer for her. This is the moment that Foster correctly calls attention to as 'the most important demonstration of the magnanimous tone of the poem,' emphasizing the kindness of the Gast to others, his wife and the inquisitive clergy to whom he speaks. The Gast's response is indeed a 'chivalrous suggestion' as Foster contends; indeed Foster's use of the word chivalrous acknowledges the influence of the romantic tradition in this poem - the poet himself calls the Gast 'noble'. When the Gast's wife does not, or cannot, respond, the Prior repeats his question to the Gast, who still refuses to speak and replace his wife's voice with his own: 'Ask hirself', he says, 'sho kan thee say'. The Gast's respect for his wife's 'spiritual privacy', as Foster calls it, is evident here, and so is his recognition of her as equal to him in speaking ability and worth. The importance of protecting his wife in all ways is touchingly apparent here, when the Gast even defends her right to speak for and about herself. He privileges her voice over the request of the Prior for an answer, a theme that will appear again in the moment of confession - or perhaps more accurately non-confession - that is central to the poem.

As in Sir Orfeo, this is a moment of confession that is not precisely confession, in which the poet never explicitly makes clear the exact sin of the hero. In Sir Orfeo, however, Orfeo explains his sin in his speech to his earls and barons, in which he cites the loss of Heurodis and his failure to save her as the error that requires his abdication and exile (because Sir Orfeo is a more standard romance, this secular and somewhat debatable concept of sin is allowable). When we turn to theology in The Gast of Gy, the religious tropes are very apparent throughout the poem, and we expect - as in other purgatorial poems like The Vision of Tundale - to be shown or told precisely what sin the Gast of Gy committed, so that we may avoid it. However, the Gy-poet alerts us in this moment to the fact that his work is not a standard purgatory poem any more than Sir Orfeo is. He denies us the chance to hear his confession and the heart of his suffering: 'God will it noght/ That I that syn suld tyll yhow say/ That thurgh schryft es done oway./ Of that syn we bath war schryven./ Tharfor of God it es forgyven'. In other words, God does not want him to tell the Prior about his sin, because it has been forgiven and done away with. It is a business between the Gast and God now, again demonstrating the poem's concern for the protection of personal and emotional space.

In a move that seems oddly contrary to the Gast's privileging of privacy, recent scholarship has attempted to uncover the source of his sin, with guesses ranging from infanticide to conjugal sodomy to simply enjoying sex too much. Foster, in his introduction to the poem, dismisses the idea of infanticide as 'extreme in view of the tone of the narrative'; more likely, he suggests, 'it was one of the sexual behaviors proscribed by the Church even between husband and wife, perhaps simply the enjoyment of sex without the primary purpose of procreation'. This last interpretation fits what Foster calls the 'love and mutuality' of the poem, the insistence on the importance of the human bond that is so apparent in the Gast's return. In his recent chapter on 'Purgatory in the Marriage Bed', Robert S. Sturges makes the case that the undisclosed sin is that of sodomy. He suggests that 'the relationship of sodomy to the miraculous is explored primarily in terms of the visibility and invisibility, as well as the audibility and inaudibility, of bodies and sins', and also that 'The Gast of Gy[...] has something to reveal to a modern audience about the nature of a nonconforming medieval marriage, and especially about the possibility[...] of policing a marriage outside the ideological mainstream.' The idea of the miracle for Sturges is linked with vision and apparition; the Gast of Gy troubles this distinction because his ghostly form can be heard, and can see others, but cannot actually be seen. Sturges makes the connection that 'the very unspeakability and unknowability of the "unnatural" sin for which Gy and his wife are being punished suggest[...] that the sin is indeed sodomy, defined as non-procreative genital activity.' Sodomy is a site of confusion, a sin 'both pursued and refused as an audible or visible object of knowledge', and 'will not respond to demands that it be made available to sensory knowledge'; it is an unclear space with a broad and inclusive definition, and Sturges' parallels are convincing. The lack of communication about the sin does appear to correspond with the unknowability of the sin itself.

In this reading, the sin must escape the attempts by the Prior to police it, as it successfully does. The strength of the shared love between Gy and his wife appears for Sturges as a part in the silence, concealment, and ambiguity that surrounds the unnamable sin against nature: conjugality in this sense actually reinforces the resistant effects of sodomy. While the bond between Gy and his love is acknowledged, here it is rewritten into a rather extreme site of resistance and secrecy, perhaps at the expense of the prior cooperativeness of the Gast and also the purity and simplicity of his marital devotion. The Gast refuses to speak not because he is complicit in a conspiracy of silence, or because of the nature of the sin; he explicitly refuses because, after he has already been shriven and forgiven, he does not need to tell it again. This is another chance for him to privilege private space and individual priorities; the sin is now between him, God, and his wife, who has shared in it. It may be any marital sin, since he will not tell us, and indeed the nature of the sin is not as important as the fact that it provides a chance for the Gast to provide commentary on the nature of confession, forgiveness, and most especially privacy.

The Gast goes on to warn wedded men in general to 'kepe allway/ The rewle of wedyng with thair myght/ And duely do both day and nyght', and says that to give this warning is part of why God allowed him to return - but the warning is highly non-specific, and refuses to tell a reader anything he does not already know. One should keep the rule of wedding - but clearly Gy and his wife erred in that respect, and we cannot learn what pitfall to avoid if he will not tell us. With this refusal we are alerted to several things. Gy has already proved to be a knowledgeable, intelligent spirit; he now shows the strength of his individuality, refusing to make public what is between himself and God (that is, his self and God). Gy thus takes himself out of the realm of purgatorial protagonists whose function is to set an example. If he does not function as a purgatorial protagonist, then we must accept him as what he claims to be: a man motivated above all by love, even after death and in pain displaying the soul of chivalry and fidelity in his devotion to his wife, struggling through torments to save her. The Gast of Gy is a romantic hero at his best, transplanted into a theological setting and using it to complete his mission on the spiritual plane.

Sir Orfeo, on the other hand, is considered a romance, despite having all the trappings of a penitential poem. It emphasizes the secular ideals of chivalry and of warrior prowess, in Orfeo's journey from a well-off king, fighting to protect his queen, and fits neatly into Finlayson's categorization of a courtly romance, in which the knight's love for an (earthly) lady is his motivating force. The poem opens with a portrait of an ideal courtly existence; as Seth Lerer has observed, 'largesse and courtesy reign, and Orfeo's lineage, combined with Heurodis's grace and beauty, tells the reader that this is an idealized court patterned along the lines of romantic convention'. Lerer proceeds to emphasize the role of artistry and craft in the poem, arguing that it 'articulates a vision of art's power to reshape experience'; it is indeed Orfeo's own artistry with the harp that provides the means for him to rescue Heurodis, though he can only make use of it after cleansing himself of sin during a penitential experience. Orfeo's sin is not against God, but against the ideals of chivalry, which he appears to have failed when he is unable to defend Heurodis, his wife, and though he moves through a phase of deprivation and atonement, making use of the confessional and penitential practices, he is also rewarded with a reestablishment of secular, lordly success. Sir Orfeo thus privileges the romantic concerns over the theological.

In the tale, Heurodis is visited by the king of Faerie while sleeping under an orchard-tree at noon; he tells her that 'tomorwe thatow be/ Right here under this ympe-tre; and than thou schalt with ous go/ And live with ous evermo'. Sir Orfeo, of course, refuses to let his queen go so easily. When the next day dawns he assembles his 'armes', and with 'ten hundred knights...Ich y-armed, stout and grim', he accompanies Heurodis to the tree and waits to do battle. However, the Queen is snatched from their midst without a chance for opposition: 'Ac yete amiddes hem ful right/ The Quen oway y-tvight,/ With fairi forth y-nome;/ Men wist never wher sche was bicome'. The structure of confession and penance is here enacted, not explicitly, but in Orfeo's actions after the abduction of Heurodis (something he seems to have had no earthly means of preventing, as all his secular strength of arms cannot avail him). Orfeo, after weeping with such impassioned grief that it nearly costs his life, calls his 'barouns, erls, [and] lords of renouns' together, and establishes his 'Heighe Steward' to watch over his kingdom and keep safe his lands. As explanation, in a sense confessing to them all, he offers his failure to protect Heurodis: 'For now Ichave mi Quen y-lore...Never eft I nil no woman se./ Into wildernes Ichil te...'. Because, in his own mind, Orfeo has committed the sin of failing at his chivalric and husbandly duty, he must make atonement, and this he proposes to do by living in the wilderness evermore, seeing no woman ever again and spending his days with the wild beasts.

Though Orfeo's inability to defend his lady is not a sin in the strictly religious sense, it is a sin for a knight, king, and husband, and it is the reason he gives for the expiation he will force himself to undergo. In comments similar to Sturges' discussion of the sin of sodomy in The Gast of Gy, A.C. Spearing opens his discussion of Sir Orfeo by commenting on the 'unexpectedness and inexplicability of the fairy summons' and the way in which the fairy world 'bring[s] an element of the inexplicable into human life'. The moment of sin - here defined by Orfeo himself as his failure to protect his lady - remains always elusive and problematic. The point, as in The Gast of Gy, is not the moment of the sin itself, but what that moment allows us to say about the importance of individual, personal space for the repentance of it. When Orfeo departs, he takes with him a pilgrim's mantle, suggesting his spiritual intent (though Orfeo does not go on a typical religious pilgrimage, his exile is indeed an act of personal spiritual cleansing). The following description of Orfeo's penance is reminiscent of both the wanderings of John the Baptist and of Christ in the wilderness in its primal elementalism: 'Now may he al day digge and wrote,/ Er he finde his fille of rote./ In somer he liveth bi wild frut/and berien bot gode lite;/ in winter may he nothing finde/bot rot, grases, and the rinde'. The king who once had had 'knights of priis/Bifor him kneland, and levedis' now sees only 'wilde wormes' slide by him; his body becomes dwindled and scarred by poverty; though he once dwelt in castles and towers, Orfeo now 'mot make his bed in mese', though 'it comenci to snewe and frese'. The only thing that remains to Orfeo from his former life is his harp, with which he is able to charm all the wild beasts in the wood where he wanders; this power of music will be the instrument through which he will act to regain Heurodis.

On occasion Orfeo even sees the hosts of the fairy King riding by, but he has no thought of action; for him, the act of penance, not vengeance, is enough. As Kenneth R.R. Gros Louis noted in his early article 'The Significance of Sir Orfeo's Self-Exile', Orfeo 'obviously does not expect any change in his fortunes' once he embarks on his penitential exile, 'not once, in all those years, does he look for Heurodis. He is obviously not on any kind of heroic quest, yet, after ten years of suffering, Orfeo accidentally comes upon Heurodis in a group of ladies hunting. He has not sought her, he has not questioned her disappearance, and suddenly she appears alive before him'. There is no seeking, no questioning or questing, on Orfeo's part. There is only humble self-abasement and sorrow. Gros Louis emphasizes Orfeo's 'deep humility', suggesting that his new life resembles that of a hermit, and explicitly claiming that 'the ten years he spends in the wilderness constitute a kind of penance, and because of it, Orfeo receives a gift of grace - Heurodis is returned to him.' Orfeo is here discussed in religious terms reminiscent of the Gast of Gy's theological explication; even more, Orfeo appears distinctly different from the actively questing hero of other romance subgenres. He succeeds not because of his action, but because of his inaction; not because of his martial prowess, but because of his willingness to suffer for his flaws and failures, as Gros Louis notes, 'without complaint'.

After ten years of these thoughts of pure sorrow and guilt (the proper emotions to accompany confession and restitution), Orfeo is rewarded: he catches sight of Heurodis riding among the ladies of the fairy court. Like a good knight, he immediately determines to take advantage of this chance to attempt anew the rescue of his fair lady, and follows the riders back to that 'fair cuntray, as bright so sunne on somers day' from whence they've come. In a sense, this may be a test for Orfeo: given the same situation, the chance to rescue Heurodis, will he still attempt to return, raise an earthly knightly army, and try to defend her with swords, as he did the first time, or has he learned that the greater saving power resides in repentance and penitential acts? He has, of course, learned the latter. Here it becomes apparent that Orfeo's enactment of the penitential ritual is the only thing allowing him to rescue Heurodis: if he had not appeared to be - and indeed become in truth - a simple poor minstrel, he could never have been admitted to the fairy king's presence, nor obtained the offer of anything he desired in exchange for his harping - the offer, of course, that allows him to demand Heurodis as a reward, and so to effect her salvation. (The guise of the penitent will also allow Orfeo, making skillful use of this new paradigm, to test the loyalty and love of his steward and lead to the poem's ultimately happy ending.) Sir Orfeo, then, is not merely making use of the structures of confession and penance because he can; both the character and the poem are aware that only in this paradigm do they have any hope of saving the damsel and reaching the hoped-for happy resolution, a theme that we have seen echoed in The Gast of Gy.

As has been noted, Sir Orfeo is a symmetrical poem: Orfeo's loss of Heurodis leads to his loss of the kingdom; once he recovers her, he can recover everything that was lost. Therefore Orfeo's new understanding of the strength of confession and penance (as opposed to the strength of earthly armies) is his means of saving not only his wife, but also his reign. Orfeo recovers Heurodis after he has let penitential exile change him; having expiated his sin and successfully recovered her, he can go home. In this final sequence Orfeo uses what he has learned to test others: he goes clothed as a beggar into his city, and asks his Steward to aid him in his 'destresse'. Once again, the appearance of the humble penitent serves him well; the Steward, unaware of his guest's identity, nevertheless makes him welcome. Sir Orfeo then relates to the Steward how he found his harp by a dead man, and the sincere grief displayed by the Steward tells the disguised king that his retainer is 'a trewe man,/And loved him as he aught to do'. Had Sir Orfeo been recognizable as the man he had once been, this emotion could not have been tested truthfully; but Orfeo has learned the power of the penitent, and with it discovers loyalty. Only then can the symmetry of the poem be fulfilled, as Sir Orfeo and his queen are restored completely. In his essay on the poem, Erik Kooper argues that 'the reunion of Orfeo and Heurodis and the homecoming scene are of crucial importance to at least one major theme of the poem, that of ideal kingship'; the poem for Kooper is about the question of restoring harmony when the initial 'paradisiac state' is disrupted. It is Orfeo's voyage into the wilderness, his penance, that allows first the restoration of his wife, and subsequently his throne. Harmony is found again, in both Orfeo's secular realm and the spiritual.

Both Sir Orfeo and The Gast of Gy, in the end, are romances, though very different in type. Both contain the common romantic elements of adventure, of love, and of the supernatural; both portray a hero who strives to save his wife even from the underworld; both heroes undergo a form of expiation for their sins (Sir Orfeo in exile, the Gast of Gy in Purgatory) and only through the enactment of this religious structure can they succeed in their chivalric quests. Sir Orfeo is a secular romance, but one that recognizes and makes use of the power of confession and atonement. The Gast of Gy is a theological romance, a poem that inverts the formula of a spiritual quest: instead of using the quest framework for spiritual salvation, Gy uses the spiritual framework to rescue secular love. Penance for one's sins in both these poems, then, serves a dual love perhaps unintended by the Fourth Lateran Council. It purifies and brings the penitent titular characters themselves closer to the love of God; but it also provides an avenue for a different kind of salvation: the rescue of the earthly, passionate, marital, and above all secular love of one's life - or afterlife.

Kristin Noone, University of California, Riverside

Works Cited

Anon., The Gast of Gy, in Three Purgatory Poems, ed. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004). [accessed 12 December 2006].

Anon., Sir Orfeo, in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995), p. 174-190.

Braswell, Mary Flowers, The Medieval Sinner: Characterization and Confession in the Literature of the English Middle Ages (London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983).

Finlayson, John, 'Definitions of Middle English Romance', in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1995), p.428-456.

Foster, Edward E., 'The Gast of Gy: Introduction', in Three Purgatory Poems, ed. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004). [accessed 12 December 2006].

Greenblatt, Stephen, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

Gros Louis, Kenneth R.R., 'The Significance of Sir Orfeo's Self-Exile', The Review of English Studies, 18:71 (1967), pp. 245-252.

Hopkins, Andrea, The Sinful Knights: A Study of Middle English Penitential Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

Kooper, Erik, 'The Twofold Harmony of the Middle English Sir Orfeo', in Companion to Early Middle English Literature, 2nd edition, ed. N.H.G.E. Veldhoen & H. Aertsen (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995), p.115-132.

Le Goff, Jacques, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Lerer, Seth, 'Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo', Speculum, 60:1 (1985), pp. 92-109.

Logarbo, Mona L., 'Introduction: The Gast of Gy', in Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett & Thomas H. Bestul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p.64-71.

Putter, Ad, 'Introduction', in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter & Jane Gilbert (Harlow: Longman Medieval & Renaissance Library, 2000), p.1-15.

Root, Jerry, 'Space to Speke': The Confessional Subject in Medieval Literature (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc, 1997).

Shepherd, Stephen, 'Sources and Backgrounds: Sir Orfeo', in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1995), p. 345-348.

Spearing, A.C. 'Sir Orfeo: Madness and Gender', in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter & Jane Gilbert (Harlow: Longman Medieval & Renaissance Library, 2000), p.258-272.

Sturges, Robert S., 'Purgatory in the Marital Bed: Conjugal Sodomy in The Gast of Gy', in Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. Rosalynn Voaden & Diane Wolfthal, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Vol. 280 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), p.57-78. and Renaissance Studies, 2005), p.57-78.

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NOTES

1. Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knights: A Study of Middle English Penitential Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 20.

2. Ad Putter, 'Introduction', in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter & Jane Gilbert (Harlow: Longman Medieval & Renaissance Library, 2000), pp. 1-15 (p. 1).

3. Putter, pp. 1-2.

4. Putter, p. 2.

5. Mary Flowers Braswell, The Medieval Sinner: Characterization and Confession in the Literature of the English Middle Ages (London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), pp. 19-35 (p. 27).

6. Jerry Root, 'Space to Speke': The Confessional Subject in Medieval Literature (New York: Peter Lang , 1997), p. 3.

7. Root, p. 5.

8. Edward E. Foster, 'The Gast of Gy: Introduction', in Three Purgatory Poems, ed. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004). [accessed 12 December 2006] (par. 9-10 of 21).

9. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 132.

10. Greenblatt, p. 131.

11. Foster, p. 10.

12. Foster, p. 16.

13. The Gast of Gy, in Three Purgatory Poems, ed. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004). [accessed 12 December 2006], lines 1497-1499. Subsequent references by line number.

14. The Gast of Gy, 46.

15. The Gast of Gy, 189-191.

16. The Gast of Gy, 235.

17. The Gast of Gy, 249.

18. Greenblatt, p. 112.

19. Foster, p. 19

20. Foster, p. 19.

21. Root makes his point especially well when discussing confession and Chaucer, pp. 95-104.

22. The Gast of Gy, 435-440.

23. Greenblatt, p. 117.

24. John Finlayson, 'Definitions of Middle English Romance', in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995), pp. 428-456 (p. 442).

25. Mona L. Logarbo, 'Introduction: The Gast of Gy', in Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett & Thomas H. Bestul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 64-71 (p. 65).

26. Logarbo, p. 66.

27. Jacques Le Goff's The Birth of Purgatory is an excellent source for an overview of the development of the concept of Purgatory.

28. The Gast of Gy, 558.

29. Foster, p. 23.

30. The Gast of Gy, 1490-1495.

31. The Gast of Gy, 1497-1499.

32. Greenblatt, p. 130.

33. The Gast of Gy, 1500-1504.

34. The Gast of Gy, 1505-1511.

35. Greenblatt, p. 131.

36. The Gast of Gy, 1360-1366.

37. The Gast of Gy, 1382.

38. Foster, p. 22.

39. Foster, p. 22.

40. The Gast of Gy, 1404.

41. The Gast of Gy, 1438-42.

42. Foster, p. 22.

43. Robert S. Sturges, 'Purgatory in the Marital Bed: Conjugal Sodomy in The Gast of Gy', in Framing the Family: Narrative and Representation in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. Rosalynn Voaden & Diane Wolfthal, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Vol. 280 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), pp. 57-78 (p. 59).

44. Sturges, p. 70.

45. Sturges, p. 72.

46. Sturges, pp. 72-3.

47. Sturges, p. 78.

48. The Gast of Gy, 1438-42.

49. The Gast of Gy, 1451-53.

50. Finlayson, p. 441.

51. Seth Lerer, 'Artifice and Artistry in Sir Orfeo', Speculum, 60:1 (1985), 92-109 (p. 94).

52. Lerer, p. 94.

53. Sir Orfeo, in Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995), lines 165-9. Subsequent references by line number.

54. Sir Orfeo, 182-3.

55. Sir Orfeo, 191-4.

56. Seth Lerer has observed that Heurodis's 'horrifying dream and mystifying abduction imply the insufficiency of mere physical security' (p. 96); thus Orfeo's solution must also transcend the physical and partake of the spiritual in order to succeed.

57. Sir Orfeo, 201.

58. Sir Orfeo, 209.

59. A.C. Spearing, 'Sir Orfeo: Madness and Gender', in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter & Jane Gilbert (Harlow: Longman Medieval & Renaissance Library, 2000), pp. 258-272 (p. 262).

60. Sir Orfeo, 255-260.

61. Sir Orfeo, 249-250.

62. Sir Orfeo, 247.

63. Orfeo's abilities as a harpist, while perhaps simply carrying over from the older story or showing a self-referential reverence for the transcendent power of music, may also be another Christian reference: King David was held to be a skillful harpist, and it has been suggested that Orfeo's power over animals and ability to retrieve the dead are analogous to Christ's powers as the Good Shepherd. See Stephen Shepherd's note on sources and backgrounds of Sir Orfeo in Middle English Romances (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995), pp. 345-8.

64. From lines 281 to 315, Orfeo watches fairy hosts pass him by, apparently on more than one occasion, and seems merely an observer of their hunts. When he sees their falcons catching prey, he laughs, recalling that 'Ich was y-won swiche werk to see!' This flash of interested memory is what moves him to draw nearer, not any symptoms of anger or desire for vengeance, and almost instantaneously he encounters an anonymous lady, who turns out to be Heurodis.

65. Kenneth R.R. Gros Louis, 'The Significance of Sir Orfeo's Self-Exile', The Review of English Studies, 18:71 (1967), pp. 245-252 (p. 246).

66. Gros Louis, p. 247.

67. Gros Louis, p. 247. Gros Louis also provides an interesting comparison of this version of the Orpheus myth with other early medieval sources, such as the Celtic 'Wooing of Etain' and the 'King Orfeo' ballad; he notes that Orfeo's extended penitential wandering is peculiar to the Sir Orfeo poem, an important point in light of the emerging emphasis on formal structures of confession and penance and their reflections in literature.

68. Sir Orfeo, p. 351.

69. Stephen Shepherd, 'Sources and Backgrounds: Sir Orfeo,' in. Middle English Romances, ed. Stephen Shepherd (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995), p. 346.

70. Sir Orfeo, 514.

71. Sir Orfeo, 554-5.

72. Erik Kooper, 'The Twofold Harmony of the Middle English Sir Orfeo', in Companion to Early Middle English Literature, ed. N.H.G.E. Veldhoen & H. Aertsen, 2nd edn (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995), pp. 115-132 (p. 117).

73. Kooper, p.124-5. Though the use of 'paradisiac' may be a bit extreme, there can be no doubt that the initial presentation of Orfeo's court is a happy and tranquil one. Kooper interweaves the metaphor of the harp and musical and social harmony very well throughout his discussion of the poem.