ELH

i. wonderful objects

The first section of the Squire’s Tale scrutinizes wonder, both its triggers and its constitution. So uncontroversial a claim—“wonder” in various forms appears ten times in the tale’s first 310 lines—bears discussion because wonder, although long affiliated with literature, has been largely denied to medieval literature. According to its traditional literary history, intellectuals in ancient Greece and Rome, including Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, and a host of classical rhetoricians, made [End Page 464] wonder a goal of poetry, drama, or both. Remnants of their work can be detected in the Middle Ages, but only in diminished form. It was during the Renaissance that western writers began to embrace wonder explicitly, a situation that remained at least until the eighteenth century, when wonder perhaps ceded its place to the sublime.¹⁴

The account is objectionable less for the retiring role it assigns to the Middle Ages than for the way it justifies that role. The problem is not that medieval writers ignored wonder. Late-medieval natural philosophy investigates it with particular frequency, a by-product of its pronounced interest in the mechanisms of marvels. Similarly productive of wonder were miracles—Thomas Aquinas suggests that miraculum is etymologically related to admiratio (wonder) and defines a miracle as something “full of wonder from itself” [et hoc sonat miraculi, quod scilicet sit de se admiratione plenum]—but miracles were avowedly supernatural and therefore beyond the sure grasp of the benighted viator.¹⁵ Occasionally, one even finds medieval writers claiming wonder as the purpose of poetry. For instance, Albertus Magnus baldly declares that “the poet fashions a story in order to rouse one toward wonder” [poeta fingit fabulam ut excitet ad admirandum].¹⁶ As aphoristic and assured as any found in later periods, his claim is a reminder that much of what looks like literary theory in the Middle Ages comes from philosophy.

Outside of philosophical and theological contexts, marvels certainly appear in medieval writings. They crowd the pages of romance, hagiography, miracle stories, and travel narratives. Magical boats and speaking animals inhabit the landscape of far-off lands. Knights in pursuit of distressed damsels enter enchanted towers, and virgins proving their worth drink from magical fountains that scream if touched by the unchaste. No reader of medieval English literature can fail to notice such wonders, but the texts rarely investigate wonder proper. The Squire’s Tale is a notable exception.¹⁷ In order to find sustained, theoretical interest in it, at least in the Latin West, typically one must turn to theology or philosophy.¹⁸

It is precisely the philosophical and theological nature of most medieval theorizing about wonder that is used to explain why a full-fledged poetics of wonder did not emerge in the period.¹⁹ Although acknowledging the “Aristotelian heritage” behind early modern notions of wonder, then, Peter Platt speaks of “Aristotelian shackles” from which the period’s writers needed to free themselves.²⁰ T. G. Bishop refers not just to Aristotle but also to Plato and Descartes when he labels philosophy “wonder’s adjunct and antagonist.”²¹ In his view, its [End Page 465] skeptical attitude toward wonder was an impediment to the concept’s literary development. Within such assertions lies the implication that wonder’s maturation was stymied because it was out of place in the Middle Ages. Claude Lecouteux and Jacques Le Goff express the view most directly when they cast the medieval church as wonder’s opponent.²² Although naturally “allergic to the marvelous,” it made space for wonder in its theology and hagiography because pre-Christian cultures and attitudes required it to do so.²³ Imaginative and unpredictable, wonder had to be contained by an institution that sought to centralize power. Where it was viewed with such suspicion, it could not exercise its full potential, which appears to mean that it could not occupy its rightful place at the heart of literary theory.

The bias that sets philosophy and theology in opposition to poetry is entrenched in old animosities imagined to exist between scholasticism and humanism and even faith and reason, and it has been difficult to uproot satisfactorily. I claim that the Squire’s Tale effectively contradicts it, at least with respect to philosophy. However, the influence of natural philosophy on Chaucer’s romance has often been misunderstood, perceived more as an obstacle than an aid to his musings on wonder. It has been conventional to conclude that philosophers “flattened” and “de-wondered” marvels through their scientific investigations, and even that the eventual ascendancy of science over superstition began with such efforts.²⁴ Such a perspective takes root in the deeply held notion that science counteracts wonder, which I discuss further below, and it has encouraged unsympathetic readings of Chaucer’s treatment of marvels in the Squire’s Tale.²⁵ Scott Lightsey thus writes that “mira-bilia are undone through parallel depictions of technical construction, means of operation, and inquiries into cause.”²⁶ John Fyler similarly argues that the common people “empty [the Squire’s] marvels of their exoticism” by seeking explanations and precedents for them.²⁷ Susan Crane, in my mind the most perceptive modern reader of the tale, refers generally to “romance’s favoring of wonder over explanation.”²⁸ She defends the mysteriousness of the tale’s marvels, but still suggests that the crowd’s interest in their technical operations might threaten their power to enchant. However, the crowd’s querying approach to the marvels demystifies them no more than philosophy demystifies literature. The Squire’s Tale instead appeals to philosophy to aid its inquiry into the potency of the mind’s images.

When the marvels first appear, they seem designed merely to entertain. The clamor at the birthday feast pauses “for merveille” of the foreign knight when he enters to deliver them (87). As he approaches [End Page 466] the food-laden high table, he assumes the position of the minstrels, who were playing there “deliciously” when he entered (79). The synesthetic description suggests sensory confusion, or perhaps sensory overload, at this high table of delights.²⁹ In the context of such auditory, gastronomical, and visual splendor, the gifts might be just more baubles to please the senses. However, attention quickly shifts from the objects to their effect on a crowd of eager onlookers. The mirror and sword are whisked off to the tower and the ring is delivered to Canacee, leaving the horse alone in public view. It creates a minor frenzy. The crowd, much like that before any masterpiece, “swarmeth to and fro / To gauren [stare] on this hors” (189–90). Initial inspections only confound them, and they stoke their fears with reasoning that gets away from itself. As Crane has observed, they bring the horse to life as they contemplate its lifelike qualities: in one line, “it” resembles an Apulian horse, while the next line pronounces the horse flawless from “his tayl unto his ere” (195–96, emphasis added).³⁰ It inhabits the imaginative space that the people give it, becoming more vivid in its imagined form than the physical object before them.

The people propose improbable theories, accounting creatively for an object that they cannot explain otherwise. Already alive, the horse becomes larger than life. The people turn to “olde poetries” and liken it to Pegasus and the Trojan horse, situating it within myth and epic (206). Not surprisingly, they also appeal to magic, long credited with the invention of flying horses, even if only illusory ones.³¹ They know where flying and otherwise mysterious horses reside in their culture’s literature, but not which precedent applies to their situation.³² As they accumulate different scenarios in which a flying horse makes sense, they fuel the wonder they felt upon encountering it. One mentions the Trojan horse and becomes scared. “Another rowned [whispered] to his felawe lowe, / And seyde, ‘He lyeth, for it is rather lyk / An apparence ymaad by some magyk, / As jogelours [conjurers] pleyen at thise feestes grete” (216–19). His quiet whispering (he “rowned … lowe”) and assertion that it is merely “lyk / An apparence” match the spectral quality of the object he describes. An illusion is already a seeming, an appearance with no substance, and when the speaker qualifies it further, he twice removes it from reality. The horse is like an image of a horse, and so uncertain a thing can only be whispered about. In the same way, discussion of the ring turns to the bewitching rings of Moses and Solomon and leads the people to “drawen hem apart” in fear (252). The ring is nowhere near them. They back away from an image they concoct, but they respond to it as though the [End Page 467] merely imagined ring were an object directly before them. Refashioned, imagined marvels supplant the real ones, inspiring in each speaker the emotion and behavior appropriate to the scenario each has selected. The marvels live most vividly in the minds of those who inspect them.

Their responses testify to the power of imagination to create images more compelling than those of the bodily senses. The individual who imagines the Trojan horse says, “Myn herte … is everemoore in drede; / I trowe some men of armes been therinne, / That shapen hem this citee for to wynne” (212–14). What is imagined has physical consequences, here felt in the speaker’s heart. That the marvels pique the imagination in particular is explicit. The people who look upon the horse and think of Pegasus and the Trojan Horse “maden skiles after his fantasies, / Rehersynge of thise olde poetries” (205–6). “Fantasies” derives from the ancient Greek word for imagination, phantasia, and the Middle English word has the same meaning. The belief that a heightened imagination can act on physical objects is widely held in medieval philosophy, and it forms the basis of many accounts of marvels. The minor point illustrated in the Squire’s Tale, that imagination affects one’s own body, is uncontroversial. Thus the fourteenth-century philosopher and court adviser Nicole Oresme explains that imagining someone gaping can make you gape, imagining water or thirst can make you thirsty, and imagining an enemy can make you angry, agitated, and warm.³³ A more startling possibility widely sanctioned by medieval philosophers was that those with extremely powerful imaginations could alter foreign bodies. The most famous example in the period was the evil eye: following Arabic philosophers, Latin scholastics held that an evil and envious old woman might imagine the deformation of a beautiful infant so powerfully that she could in fact deform the child.³⁴ Imagination is often at the heart of medieval philosophers’ theories about how marvels work, theories that attribute a stunning potency to the images within the mind.³⁵ The fact that Chaucer’s rhyme scheme aligns “fantasies” with “poetries” also suggests that a piqued imagination readily finds its way to literature. Both marvels and poetry harness the power of imagination’s images.

While the Squire’s Tale associates marvels with poetry, it also highlights the potential similarity between literary and philosophical accounts of marvels. Neither the tale nor much scholastic philosophy discriminates strongly between literary references and scientific ones when evaluating them. In the Squire’s Tale, the spear is as well accounted for by stories of Achilles’s “queynte spere” as by the science of tempering metal, while the mirror recalls Virgil’s mirror as well as [End Page 468] optical works by Alhazen and Witelo (239). Science and literature present equally acceptable and comparable explanations. Similarly, works of natural philosophy abound in references to literary marvels as though they were of the same kind as non-literary ones. Nicole Oresme explains that subterranean vapors, when inhaled, can generate special powers, such as the ability to foresee future events. Such “pestiferous exhalation” [exalatione pestifera] accounts for an array of marvels in literature, including the powers of the Aeneid’s sybil and St. Patrick’s only supposed journey to purgatory.³⁶ Master of theology and eventual bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne includes Merlin in his discussion of incubi, from which Merlin was supposed to descend.³⁷ The joining of literary to scientific references does not demean those who associate them but rather tacitly acknowledges the two fields’ shared investment in wonder.

As such comments might suggest, the members of Chaucer’s wondering crowd are not ridiculous because they wonder or because they react to it as they do. The point is worth making because scholars have subjected the crowd to some unflattering assessment over the years.³⁸ They take their lead from the speaker, who records the people’s thoughts about the horse before calling them, no doubt pejoratively, “lewed peple” (221) who are unable “in hir lewednesse” (223) to comprehend the subtlety of its operations. The common people might therefore serve as an advertisement against wonder in a tale that has often been judged unable to produce it. Although it enchanted its early readers, most famously Edmund Spenser and John Milton, the tale fell from critical grace in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has only recently begun to inch its way back into favor.³⁹ However, its philosophical context can help to reveal the perspicacity as well as the timeliness of its musings on wonder.

The crowd’s encounter with the horse in particular offers a textbook example of how wonder works. It begins with a spectacular sensory phenomenon that inspires a sort of paralysis—in Albertus Magnus’s memorable phrase, wonder is “a systole of the heart” [systole cordis]—and gives way to inquiry.⁴⁰ What was that? How did he or she do that? Why did that happen? The gathered crowd thus begins by staring at the horse and taking in its features. It is tall and broad, it appears to be strong, and it resembles a living horse so closely that neither nature nor art could improve it, or so “al the people wende” (198). Its placement at the intersection between nature and art reaffirms Crane’s conclusion that it is neither simply machine nor horse, but combines features of both.⁴¹ Mere perception cannot explain so indeterminate a creature, [End Page 469] and indeed it is a defining characteristic of marvels that they are more than the sum of their physical features. As we have seen, the people therefore turn to theories more or less far-fetched. Explaining how wonder is a species of fear, Aquinas writes that, in the first instance, the admirer “avoids giving judgment about the marvel, fearing error, but later inquires” [refugit in praesenti dare iudicium de eo quod miratur, timens defectum, sed in futurum inquirit].⁴² Initially, one is likely to misjudge a marvel, which is why he or she is better served by inquiring before pronouncing judgment. No benefit is gained from advertising confused, half-formed thoughts. The people speak heedlessly, but they only act as wonder invites them to do.

More remarkable than their initial credulity is their final recognition that marvels, while exceeding their powers of explanation, surely have rational explanations. They “cesseth hir janglyng and hir wonder” (257) once they acknowledge that wonder persists “til that the cause is wyst” (260). As Denise Schaeffer argues with reference to Aristotle’s view, “wonder is a matter of knowing that you don’t know,” and the people are fully cognizant of their ignorance.⁴³ Their hard-won perspective on their own marveling places them at the far end of a journey from sensory stimulation to theoretical reasoning.

Part of the bias against the lay wonderers arises from the association of wonder with unknowing. It is based in the Aristotelian dictum, often expressed in the Middle Ages, that people wonder at what they do not understand. As Aquinas has it, “we wonder at something when we observe its effect but do not know its cause” [admiramur enim aliquid cum, effectum videntes, causam ignoramus].⁴⁴ From this perspective, wonder might be judged a flaw in need of remedy. However, it is an inevitable, and in many respects even a constructive state. We have seen that Aristotle, in a much-cited passage, plants the seeds of philosophy in wonder, which presupposes ignorance and also provides a pathway out of it. It might seem that wonder befits the intellectually immature, but Aristotle makes it clear that one advances through wonder to increasingly difficult questions, as about the cosmos and the origins of the universe. Surely to be ignorant regarding such matters is not laughable, and the willingness to be perplexed by them might even be laudable. Further, while wonder might eventually give way to knowledge, the requirements for full understanding were exceedingly hard to meet by medieval standards. Aquinas explains,

The desire to understand the causes of the things they see is in all men by nature, whence men first began to philosophize because they [End Page 470] wondered at the things they saw whose causes they did not know, but discovering the cause, they rested. Inquiry does not cease until the first cause is reached. … The first cause of everything is God, so the ultimate end of human understanding is to know God.

[Naturaliter inest omnibus hominibus desiderium cognoscendi causas eorum quae videntur: unde propter admirationem eorum quae videbantur, quorum causae latebant, homines primo philosophari coeperunt, invenientes autem causam quiescebant. Nec sistit inquisitio quousque perveniatur ad primam causam. … Prima autem omnium causa Deus est. Est igitur ultimus finis hominis cognoscere Deum.]⁴⁵

If wonder persists until one understands how any given thing has its primary cause in God, then anyone prone to the emotion will long enjoy its company.

The tale does not nearly satisfy so high a standard when it comes to its own marvels. The ambassador shows Cambyuskan how to operate the horse, but he does not broach the most pressing question, the one that causes the common people the “mooste wonder” (199): “How that it could gon, and was of bras” (200). The real mystery is not how the horse’s buttons work but how it has the power to fly, and answering the easier question does not illuminate the harder one. The conservative fourteenth-century theologian Thomas Bradwardine, in a discussion of marvels and miracles, makes a similar point about magnets. With characteristic testiness, he asks a rhetorical question: “do you know fully the action of the magnet on iron and many actions of this sort, the secret properties of nature and the modes of their operation?” [Nunquid etiam plene nosti actionem magnetis in ferrum, & multas huiusmodi actiones, secretas naturae proprietates, & modos huiusmodi actionum?]⁴⁶ Understanding admits of degree, and realizing that magnets move iron is quite different from grasping how they do so. The Squire tells us that the horse’s maker “koude ful many a gyn” (that is, knew a lot about technological gadgets) (128) and “wayted many a constellacion” (129) before creating it, meaning that its causes are technological and astronomical, but he provides no detail.⁴⁷ The precise nature of the stars’ power over the sublunary world was a famously open question that occasioned heated debate in medieval philosophy.⁴⁸ The creation of flying machines and other sophisticated technological tools was also a keen desideratum.⁴⁹ Were there such a thing as a flying horse fashioned from the power of the heavens, many would have clamored to know precisely how it worked. The Squire’s Tale is unusual among romances because it asks about [End Page 471] the origins and mechanisms of its marvels, but in no meaningful sense does it answer those questions. Relative to its analogues, the tale is forthcoming about the horse’s pin-based navigation system, but it is very far from tracing the horse, or any marvel, back to its primary cause.⁵⁰ As though to stress the point, the Squire ends the scene with the observation that “The hors vanysshed, I noot [know not] in what manere” (342). It is a mystery still.

While it is certainly the case that wonder can be an undignified state, it is not necessarily a plebeian one.⁵¹ The Squire’s disdainful comments about lay wonderers place him in league with philosophers who attacked those too quick to feel wonder or too slow to relinquish it when a valid natural explanation presented itself, but it is hard to see how wonder in the face of such spectacular marvels is inappropriate.⁵² The people hardly ignore obvious natural causes. Further, the Squire, by chiming in with confessions of his own ignorance, appears to validate their confusion. The manufacture of swords “is unknowe, algates unto me” (246), and the properties of mirrors are described in books “as knowen they that han hir bookes herd” (235). The Squire mocks not wonder but the sputtering thoughts that it generates in its first instance.

It is worth noting that the nobles wonder as intensely as the common people, although for the most part they are spared the peering eyes of the speaker and their dignity is thus preserved. The king and a collection of lords and ladies approach the horse after dinner, and the Squire explains,

Swich wondryng was ther on this hors of brasThat syn the grete sege of Troie was,Thereas men wondreden on an hors also,Ne was ther swich a wondryng as was tho.

(306–8)

The common folk thought the brass horse resembled the Trojan Horse, but here the resemblance between the horses consists in the wonder they produce rather than the threat they might pose. The king and his retinue wonder as the Trojans wondered, perhaps experiencing a high-quality species of wonder worthy of epic. We do not know what it looks like because the speaker does not say; he does not record their thoughts or conjectures as he did the common people’s. Such opacity protects the nobles from ridicule, but it also conceals the true value of wonder, according to the tale, which is its ability to incite powerful and inventive imagining. [End Page 472]

The only case of upper class wonder that the Squire investigates in any detail is that of Canacee. It follows the same template as that of the common folk and again shows how perplexing objects produce inventive mental images. She blushes repeatedly in response to the joy that the mirror and ring bring her, recalling the onlooker whose heart was struck with fear once he imagined the horse’s worst potential. Much as he suffered physical consequences from a vividly imagined possibility, so Canacee feels “swich a joye … in hir herte” (368) because of the ring and mirror that “twenty tyme she changed hir colour” (370). The objects’ power is registered by physical change, here an increased heart rate and dilated capillaries. The mirror even inspires a vision and thus sparks her imagination, which is the standard source of visions.⁵³ The Squire’s description is at once gnomic and illuminating: “in hire sleep, right for impressioun/Of hire mirrour, she hadde a visioun” (371–72).⁵⁴ The Squire leaves the vision’s content unnarrated, again illustrating the concealment and circumspection characteristic of his approach to the nobles. Nonetheless, he records its power. “Impressioun” is ubiquitous as a medieval metaphor for sense perception and it directs attention to the image of the mirror in Canacee’s mind. What matters is not what Canacee sees in it—recall that its special power is to reveal future treachery—but what it causes her to see. Her mind is made a mirror seemingly more enthralling than the physical object itself. The scene again suggests that the tale’s interest resides less in marvels than in their power over the mind, which sees more than the senses alone can make visible.

Cambyuskan provides an instructive counterpoint to Canacee because he steadfastly refuses to wonder. The Squire paints him as an impressive but generic figure. “Ther was nowher in no regioun / So excellent a lord in alle thyng” (14–15); “hym lakked noght that longeth to a kyng” (16); “ther was nowher swich another man” (27). Describing his excellence, the speaker paints in circles: he is as he should be and nobody else is like him or better than him. It is no surprise that this statue of a king would respond to marvels with defiant equanimity.⁵⁵ When he inspects the horse, he takes an interest only in its mechanics, and once his curiosity is satisfied and he “hath conceyved in his wit aright / The manere and the forme of al this thyng,” he returns to his party (336–37). The reader’s only insight into Cambyuskan’s mind reveals an image of a horse that accurately matches the reality already presented to us. It stands in clear contrast to Canacee’s image of the mirror. His is accurate and accordant with the reality before him, but it is inert. Hers is creative. His marks the end of a scene, whereas [End Page 473] hers introduces a new one. His marks the end of marveling, and hers marks its flourishing. Once Cambyuskan learns the horse’s secrets and manages to remove it, it disappears from the tale.⁵⁶ He seems to have neutralized its power by simply reproducing it in his mind, precipitating its physical removal from the court. The tale resumes with the one marvel not confined to the tower, Canacee’s ring. Translating birdsong into human speech, the ring expressly links stories to marvels. They share various features, both resulting from careful construction and both inviting assiduous investigation, but most salient is their enlivening effect on imagination. Marvels and stories achieve it through different means, but in both cases their power to enchant is based on the force of the mental images they elicit.

ii. wonderful figures

In its first section, the Squire’s Tale testifies to the power of mental images. Formed in response to a startling object, they can be more vivid than perceived bodies, and can even generate physical consequences. The tale’s second section likewise centers around a perplexing object, this time the unfaithful tercel, and it likewise emphasizes the power of the creative images he inspires. In this case they do not belong to magic and myth—the peregrine does not imagine that the tercel might be an illusion or a creature from classical epic—but rather consist in the metaphors that the peregrine uses to describe him. Whereas the ambassador’s marvels register their force through the wonder they produce, it is metaphor that reveals the tercel’s effect on the peregrine. His spectacular duplicity finds its complement in metaphors that express sameness and difference simultaneously. Although neither the peregrine nor Canacee wonders at him—both are too emotionally invested to feel so distancing an emotion—the peregrine’s figure-laden account registers the shock of his hypocrisy.

Not only does metaphor manifest the tercel’s startling effect on her, but it also constructs him as a marvel for the reader. As medieval theories of metaphor suggest, it acts as a confounding object of its own, and its effect can fittingly be called wonder. Unlike the tale’s first section, the second does not make direct appeals to philosophy, but its perspective on metaphor resonates with that of the philosophers and rhetoricians who theorized it. They help to explain how metaphor can capture the near-contradictions that define an unfaithful bird better than the mere perception of him. They also show how metaphor acts to pique the imagination of its reader. [End Page 474]

The tercel is by no means a conventional marvel, but he operates much in the capacity of one. Resembling deceptive marvels more than innocuously enchanting ones, he occupies a position in the tale structurally parallel to that of the four marvels. Like them, he both invites inspection and resists comprehension. A dyed-in-the-wool hypocrite, he compels interest because he, like the earlier marvels, is not what he appears to be. The peregrine puzzles over him because he little resembles the bird she knew, the one who performed love perfectly. The attention that Chaucer focuses on the tercel also elicits the same querying posture from the audience that the gifts do. The peregrine pauses narrative time when she requires Canacee, along with the reader, to scrutinize him. Nonetheless, like the people conjecturing about the gifts, she fails in her quest to understand him. We learn that a repentant tercel will reunite with the peregrine in the unwritten remainder of the tale, and her interpretation of him cannot be sound if the possibility for redemption remains (654). Finally, as surprising as a marvel, the tercel possesses as great a power to invade the imagination. The senses prove inadequate to him because he deceives. Thus he was “so lyk a gentil lovere of manere” (546), with a manner that “was an hevene for to see” (558), that the peregrine thought him a gentle lover in fact. She loved him, she says, “for the trouthe I demed in his herte,” inferring inner virtue from his impeccable behavior and reasoning that his heart was true because his words and countenance appealed (563). Painting his portrait in metaphors and overlooking his physical features, she makes him a stranger to the bodily senses. Rather, only through imaginative terms can she come to terms with his nearly incomprehensible infidelity. Her use of metaphor is evidence of the unsettling affect his hypocrisy had on her, showing that she struggled to make sense of him, but it is also a stimulus and means for the audience to experience his perplexing nature for themselves. Metaphor reveals the tercel’s powerful influence on the peregrine and allows others to be similarly affected.

My claim that metaphoric images parallel those induced by wonder requires remarkable self-consciousness from the reader, and it responds to a great deal of scholarship that interprets the Squire’s Tale as commenting to some degree on itself.⁵⁷ The fact that the General Prologue identifies the Squire as a professional storyteller has licensed critics to read the tale as metanarrative, and in that spirit, various of them have suggested that storytelling itself ranks as one of its marvels.⁵⁸ Recently, the tendency to read the tale as its own theme has fallen out of fashion, but it nonetheless thematizes storytelling [End Page 475] internally through the peregrine’s heartfelt plaint. Her story stands alongside the four self-proclaimed marvels and promises to manufacture interest even better than they. It recalls the gifts in at least two respects. The peregrine brings to mind the magic mirror both because Canacee’s mirror-induced vision leads her to the bird and also because the peregrine’s story exposes the tercel’s treason, his subtlety, and his new love, the three things that we were told the mirror would reveal (see 139–40). Further, the peregrine’s story is the ultimate realization of another marvel’s power, that of the ring. As a wounded bird with a story to tell, she requires both of its oddly-matched capabilities, almost as though the ring were designed with the forlorn bird in mind.⁵⁹ The ring’s value consists above all in the story that it makes accessible. In both respects, the peregrine’s story parallels and trumps the gifts, promising to transfix its audience even better than they.

Much as the tale’s first section investigates the mechanics of marvels and wonder, so the second scrutinizes the mechanics of stories, especially the figurative language that fiction etymologically and practically relies upon. A fitting symbol of the section’s narrative stillness is the peregrine herself, who is unnaturally stationary even though she belongs to perhaps the fastest-moving species of animal on the planet, one that can reach speeds up to 200 miles per hour. She sits in a tree before fainting and falling out of it, finally relocating to a cage that is overloaded with symbolic significance. She thematizes the aborted physical progress of Canacee and narrative progress of the Squire’s Tale, directing attention instead to the tale’s mechanics. The tale thus focuses attention on its own components, especially the figurative language that provides it with a good deal of its force.

The second section of the tale abounds in self-conscious imagery that invites the reader to concentrate on the inner workings of narrative even before he or she encounters the peregrine’s plaint. The ten-line personification of sleep with which the section begins marks a jarring shift in style. With open mouth, sleep delivers a sloppy kiss to the drunken revelers and puts them to sleep. The “grotesqueness of this image of the yawning kiss,” as Gardiner Stillwell describes it, makes it impossible to overlook.⁶⁰ From the foreign knight’s unadorned description of the horse’s mechanics, the tale adopts a more poetic mode, one typically more elegant than the image that introduces it. The tale forecasts the contrast in styles early on, when the Squire comments unfavorably on his graceless rendition of the ambassador’s rhetorically expert presentation of the gifts. We are, I think, to take him at his word. His speech relies on periphrastic lines and plodding repetition, [End Page 476] unequal to the fantastic objects it describes. For instance, the brass horse will take the king wherever he wants to go “in the space of o day natureel—/That is to seyn, in foure and twenty houres” (116–17). Such explanatory rephrasing is rarely elegant, especially not in verse. The horse will respond to the king’s desires, the ambassador says, even “if yow lyst [wish] to fleen as hye in the air / As dooth an egle whan hym list to soore” (122–23). Cambyuskan can use the horse to fly as high as an eagle does when he wants to fly high. This is one of few similes in his speech, and it is amusingly flat-footed and repetitious. The tale’s second half instead abounds in imagery, from the dry tree to the extended simile about worm-eating birds that revert to their natures. Imagery is one of its most salient themes, as the peregrine’s metaphorically dense description of the dissembling tercel most effectively shows.

Metaphor serves a dual purpose, as I have described it: it records the tercel’s effect on the peregrine, revealing the extent to which he confused and surprised her, and it crosses the poem’s fourth wall, enabling the reader to share the peregrine’s puzzlement. I begin with the first. For the peregrine, metaphor makes sense of an otherwise stupefying creature. Through a pastiche of vivid images, she comes to terms with a bird who crippled sense-based judgment because he misadvertised himself egregiously. The peregrine’s response makes him a magnet for figures showing that appearances can deceive. In other words, his inconstancy is a goad to metaphor, much as Fortune’s in the Book of the Duchess. In both cases, the victims of unstable characters compose a lengthy list of misleading appearances that express their own confusion and record their long-lived effort to make sense of their deception. Translating the near incoherence of their deceivers into a seemingly endless set of competing images, they make metaphor a natural adjunct to inconstancy. Only through creative images can such puzzling creatures begin to make sense.

The peregrine’s fixation on the tercel’s hypocrisy appears in the host of images she uses, each mimicking while seeking to expose his fundamental disharmony. Narrating his departure, she says, “Fortune wolde that he most twynne / Out of that place which that I was inne” (577–78). “Twynne” appropriately carries two meanings: the tercel twins in that he leaves her, making them two separate creatures, but he also “twynnes” insofar as he becomes double himself. Only once he leaves does he become unfaithful and duplicitous. In the course of her complaint, the peregrine even turns his dishonesty into an art: [End Page 477]

Ne nevere, syn the firste man was born,Ne koude man, by twenty thousand part,Countrefete the sophymes of his art,Ne were worthy unbokelen his galoche [sandal],Ther doublenesse or feynyng sholde approche.

(552–56)

Never in the history of mankind was there one who could mimic the tercel’s art, which is itself, paradoxically, the art of mimicking, of seeming other than he is. A sophistical argument is specious because it makes the worse case seem the stronger one, and the tercel resembles such an argument because he is compelling on his surface but essentially false. He is a marvel particularly appropriate to literature because he is a lesson in the interpretation of signs, and the peregrine fittingly responds with paradoxical images that interpret him correctly.

Metaphor identifies sameness within difference, which is why it befits a bird who is both multiple and singular. Resembling something other than himself, he is a self-contained metaphor. Because he is an unstable character, metaphor, with its shifting references and multiple modes of signifying, suits him perfectly. The peregrine’s description of him shows how metaphor is appropriate to him and it deserves to be quoted at length:

‘Tho dwelte a tercelet me faste by,That semed welle of alle gentillesse;Al were he ful of treson and falsnesse,It was so wrapped under humble cheere,And under hewe of trouthe in swich manere,Under plesance, and under bisy peyne,That no wight [person] koude han wend [believed] hekoude feyne,So depe in greyn he dyed his coloures.Right as a serpent hit hym under flouresTil he may seen his tyme for to byte,Right so this god of loves ypocryteDooth so his ceremonyes and obeisaunces,And kepeth in semblaunt [seeming] alle his observauncesThat sownen [pertain] into gentillesse of love.As in a toumbe is al the faire above,And under is the corps, swich as ye woot [know],Swich was this ypocrite, bothe cold and hoot.And in this wise he served his ententeThat, save the feend, noon wiste what he mente’

(504–522) [End Page 478]

Through a set of complexly interwoven metaphors, the passage holds open several interpretive possibilities simultaneously. His falseness is a tapestry, a color, or an offering to the devil, all described further below. By braiding the metaphors together, the peregrine shows that none captures his treachery on its own. Only together can they accomplish what her early experience of the tercel did not: they make his very inconstancy intelligible.

With the first metaphor, the peregrine shows why she could not accurately judge the tercel based on her perceptions alone.⁶¹ He seemed a well of gentilesse, of nobility or noble behavior, but a well’s depth is not deducible from appearance, and the tercel’s character is not inferable from his comportment. She corrects herself by instead representing his only apparent virtues as an assortment of metaphorical coverings. While he is at his core all duplicity, he conceals his wickedness four times over with a humble expression, a “hewe of truth,” devotion, and busy effort. Artfully aligned, the images support different interpretations. The first set of metaphors constellates around clothing, with all four covers cast as things he is “wrapped under.” His humble expression encourages the reader to interpret “hewe” as “appearance”, meaning that he has the appearance of truth or sincerity. The same context suggests that “plesance” means either a pleasant demeanor or a garment. The reference to wrapping might well lead a reader to hear “pleasance” as Plaisance, the French name for the Italian city of Piacenza that was known for its fabrics. So familiar was the association that “plesaunce” developed the meaning “fine fabric.”⁶² The various images reinforce each other to suggest that he wears his humility and pleasant manner as a garment.

However, “hewe” anticipates a second set of metaphors. Its primary meaning was, as it is for us, color, which works well with the next metaphor: “So depe in greyn he dyed his coloures.” In retrospect, trouthe now appears to be a vivid color, deeply set like his other false appearances. Again, the peregrine reveals her tendency to ascribe depth to his appearance, but now she constructs a clear barrier. He may be deeply dyed in truth, but what is dyed is only the garment that covers his falseness. A third set of metaphors becomes visible in the following line, “Right as a serpent hit hym under floures.” The biblically resonant analogy leads the peregrine into express religious commentary: the tercel is a seemingly devout but in fact untrustworthy servant of the god of Love.⁶³ Her charge of religious hypocrisy retrospectively places “plesance” in a different light. According to the Middle English Dictionary, its primary meaning, derived from Latin [End Page 479] beneplacita, is “propitiation of a deity.”⁶⁴ The tercel thus shows both Love and the peregrine a sort of religious devotion, but he performs rituals without belief. He instead serves the devil, the only one who can understand him. Through these interlocking clusters of metaphors, the peregrine necessarily disperses her references, but she does not dilute her meaning.⁶⁵ The metaphors accumulate in recognition of the tercel’s ethical instability, but their remarkable legibility suggests that his duplicity can be comprehended only through their multiplicity. He was a badly performing, misleading symbol, but a tapestry of images enables the peregrine to construe him properly.

By relying on metaphor to expose the tercel’s nature, the peregrine underscores metaphor’s cognitive power. Recasting him through a series of images neither uniform nor dissonant, she suggests that they alone solve the puzzle he posed. He was an unwelcome provocation to her imagination, but she configures him properly. Her faith in the potential accuracy of metaphor coincides with that of medieval logicians who studied figures of speech as part of their domain. Given that the job of logic is to distinguish truth from falseness, its concern with figurative language is a surprise. As Deborah Black has shown most fully, it originates with Alexandrian philosophers, who included Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics in his Organon. The Organon was thought to be unified by its concern with logic, leaving philosophers with the task of explaining how rhetoric and poetics were concerned with truth.⁶⁶ Latin scholastics inherited the classification principally from Arab philosophers, as Hermannus Alemannus indicates in his prologue to his translation of the Rhetoric: “Nobody who has inspected the books of the most famous Arabs, namely Al-Farabi and Avicenna and Averroes and some others, doubts that these two books [the Poetics and Rhetoric] are logical” [Quod autem hi duo libri logicales sint, nemo dubitat qui libros perspexerit arabum famosorum, Alfarabii videlicet et Avicenne et Avenrosdi et quorundam aliorum].⁶⁷ Of course poetics could be related to logic as a negative example, with poetic language defined as a departure from truth, but philosophers proved surprisingly willing to consider the other possibility, that poetic language has its own brand of truth. When the peregrine turns to metaphor to expose the tercel’s character, she suggests that it yields to creative images better than unadorned description. The intricate and inventive tapestry of metaphors that she devises for his portrait reveals how thoroughly he confused her and how appropriate metaphor is to hypocrisy. It not only conveys her complicated response to him but also offers a means to [End Page 480] understand him. Such is the power of the images he elicits that they translate to the reader as well, who is allowed to experience his duplicity.

I turn, then, to the second function of metaphor in the tale, which is its ability to amaze its reader or hearer. Indeed, the impact of metaphoric language on another receives far more attention among medieval philosophers than the impetus to create it, although the one bears on the other. Philosophers root its capacity to engage its audience in an innate human love of comparison. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle explains that people instinctively find skilled poetic representation pleasurable: “since learning and wondering are pleasant, it follows that such things as representations must be pleasant—for instance, painting, sculpture, poetry—and every product of skillful representation” [Quoniam autem addiscere delectabile et mirari, et talia necesse delectabilia esse, scilicet imitativum, ut protractiva et statuificatio et poetica, et omne quodcumque fuerit representatum].⁶⁸ The one follows from the other because creative representation inspires learning and wonder, notably, and therefore pleasure. The belief that “representation is naturally pleasurable to man” [repraesentatio enim naturaliter homini delectabilis est], in Aquinas’s words, became customary, and rested on the conviction that people are inherently disposed to make and delight in comparisons.⁶⁹ Aquinas even classifies such representations as a species of marvel.⁷⁰

It is not just poetry that appeals to our natural disposition but more specifically metaphor, an essential part of poetry that expresses with special clarity the human tendency to associate different things.⁷¹ The common inclusion of metaphor in medieval discussions of representation shows that the instinct to represent is not an instinct to duplicate. Familiar though criticisms of the uncreative medieval mind are, writers in the period value metaphor for its potential to defamiliarize objects and concepts. Part of what makes it so remarkable is its capacity to confuse and clarify simultaneously. Geoffrey of Vinsauf explains that, as a result of metaphor and associated figures, “an object does not come before us with unveiled face; rather, an alien voice attends it, and so it shrouds itself in mist, as it were, but in a luminous mist” [res in medium facie non prodit aperta, / Nec sua vox deservit ei, sed vox aliena, / Et sic quasi nube tegit, sub nube serena].⁷² Metaphor obscures meaning only to illuminate it, a paradox that makes it especially appropriate to a self-contradicting but ultimately unitary bird.

Metaphor best stimulates the mind when it surprises, a feat it accomplishes through various devices. A rhetorical tradition holds that it repurposes old words, which are made “young” again by being put [End Page 481] to new use.⁷³ At a linguistic level, it transplants words outside of their proper ambit, locating them in a context in which they do not strictly belong. The mind registers and is arrested by their displacement. Take the Latin sentence prata rident, or “the meadows laugh,” which features prominently in medieval discussions of metaphor.⁷⁴ According to its original imposition, ridere does not pertain to meadows, but neither does the verb adopt a new meaning when applied to them. Even when predicated of meadows, ridere refers to human laughter. When used metaphorically, it adopts a new mode of signifying, meaningful only because it calls one’s attention to a feature shared by a laughing person and a meadow. For Aquinas, that shared feature is beauty: “the meadow is in beauty when it flowers as a man is when he laughs, according to the likeness of proportion” [partum … se habet in decore cum floret, sicut homo cum ridet, secundum similitudinem proportionis].⁷⁵ Similarly, Aquinas explains that God is called a lion because he performs his works as though with strength, much as a lion performs his. A lion still signifies a lion. To call God a lion is just to call attention to the strength they both possess, albeit in different ways. For medieval philosophers it was axiomatic that the mind cannot understand two things at once, meaning that metaphor must function by focusing attention on a singular quality that two things share.⁷⁶ It presents a challenge to comprehension, but a diverting and instructive one. Also, by generating a productive confusion, it provokes investigation much like wonder itself. It is a fitting response to a marvel and also a marvel in its own right.

Medieval sources help to explain why metaphor suits puzzles, and puzzling birds, especially well.⁷⁷ A theological tradition based in Dionysius’s writings favors metaphors that compare God to obviously dissimilar things. Were he to be likened to objects of beauty, the mind might rest content and contemplate them rather than God. Comparing God to an unalluring object like a worm serves the dual purpose of making meaning inaccessible to the impious and delighting the deserving. As Hugh of St. Victor explains, the Bible uses “dissimilar figures” so that “those who are studious in the contemplation of marvelous images, that is, in the contemplation of wonderfully made sacred likenesses, might be more occupied” [dissimiles figurationes … ii qui studiosi sunt, in contemplatione mirabilium imaginum, hoc est sacrarum repraesentationum mirabiliter factarum amplius exerceantur].⁷⁸ The dutiful might be furthered in their work (exerceantur) while the unworthy—literally the indigni—might be further blinded (excaecentur). Hugh’s easily spotted word play is appropriate to his [End Page 482] argument in favor of obvious metaphors, which provoke salutary inquiry into the nature of God and his ultimately incomparable superiority to any created thing. They are marvelous—he characterizes them as “marvelous images” and “wonderfully made” likenesses—because they disguise meaningful connections with apparent contradictions. The power of metaphor is its ability to expose an improbable but discernable connection between unlike things. In a different context, Geoffrey of Vinsauf likewise encourages unlikely metaphors. While discussing them, he writes that an especially effective figure results from the contrast between verb and noun, as in “silence cries out” [silentia clamant]: “they clash on the surface, but beneath there is friendly and harmonious accord” [ipsa / Oderunt sese facietenus, attamen intus / Est amor et concors sententia].⁷⁹ Metaphors delight the mind where the difference between their objects is stark. The special force of paradoxical representation presumably explains why Aristotle identifies riddles as a good source of them.⁸⁰ Pleasure is all the greater where comprehensibility is hard won.

The tercel is marvelously disparate and elicits metaphors similarly based in difference, but it is worth recognizing that metaphor can derive force from either far-fetched or intuitive comparisons, which appeal to imagination in different ways. Averroes thus defends the superiority of metaphors that strongly suggest the things they represent and isolates their impact on imagination. His examples are constellations called “crab” and “spear-bearer,” which so closely approximate in imagination the objects for which they are named that they “create doubt in the one imagining” [inducant ambiguitatem imaginanti].⁸¹ For Averroes, such doubt activates the imagination, which struggles to disentangle astral from terrestrial images. He implies that imaginative confusion and therefore imaginative activity are worthy goals for a poet to pursue. In his view, the mind delights in the struggle to distinguish similar images formed from strikingly different things. What elicits interest in this case is not the improbable connection between dissimilar things but the near-indistinguishability of different ones. In either situation, metaphors play on the difference between what things are and what they seem, and that is why they resemble marvels, which rely on the same disparity to elicit wonder.

The idea that metaphor acts on imagination and appeals to its imagemaking capacity long pre-dates the Middle Ages. As the authoritative Rhetorica ad Herennium declares, “Metaphor is used for the sake of creating a vivid mental picture” [Ea sumitur rei ante oculos ponendae causa], one seen through imagination rather than the bodily senses.⁸² [End Page 483] Metaphor endows imaginative pictures with the force of perceived objects, often relying on sensory images in order to give concepts the concrete realness of something that can be seen and touched. John Scotus Eriugena attests to the close association of imagination with metaphors when he uses “imaginationes” as their synonym. In his commentary on Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy, he warns that “sacred imaginations” [sanctis imaginationibus], or attractive metaphors, can seduce the mind away from God, and commends “dissimilar imaginations” [dissimilium imaginationum], or metaphors that compare God to unlike and unappealing objects, because they fittingly locate beauty in God alone.⁸³ Sharing with Hugh of St. Victor a fondness for dissimilar comparisons, he assumes both that metaphor appeals to imagination and that imagination can determine one’s conception of God. Imagination’s potential to capture an object’s power—not just its features but also its appeal—is tied to its creativity. Representing marvelous objects in unfamiliar and non-mimetic terms, it expresses their allure.⁸⁴

Wonder and metaphor in the Squire’s Tale are thus related, imaginative responses to a similar impetus, namely an object that resists explanation because it is not what it seems, and metaphor constitutes such an impetus in turn. Better than the external senses, imagination accounts for an object’s imperceptible features, such as the force it exercises over the one who views it and the confusion it instills. Marvels necessarily exceed perception and imagination represents the excess, bringing an object to life by representing the full experience of it. By likening literature to marvels, the Squire’s Tale calls attention to the imaginative work they both perform and shows why they are similarly arresting. It presents, in other words, a literary theory. Although it is well known that the medieval west offers no developed theory of the creative imagination or wonder as a literary value, this hardly means that either went untheorized. Rather, the association of imagination, wonder, and literature, so crucial to the development of express literary theory in England, builds in part from medieval writing about marvels.