2 ‘But of love to lere’: The Proud Lady in Love

This group encompasses Felice from Guy of Warwick (c. 1300), the Fere from Ipomadon (c. 1390–1400), Winglayne from Eger and Grime (c. 1450), Ettarde from Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur (1469–70), and of course Eglantine herself.3 Eger and Grime is a Scottish text but circulates in an anglicised form and context in London, British Library, MS Additional 27879 (the Percy Folio). These women all resist love and/or marriage (with the exception of the Morte, love is usually aligned with marriage in these works),4 In Ipomadon the Fere makes a vow refusing to be the ‘wyffe’ of an unworthy knight, but she is labelled ‘provde of love’ for this (lines 117, 104). In Blanchardyn and Eglantine, Eglantine is described as resisting love, but the concerns of her vassals clearly align this with the stakes of marriage. Eger and Grime depicts the opposite scenario: Winglayne’s vow relates a condition for her marriage, but there is no suggestion that she could love Eger or any other knight in a context separate from her proposed marriage. Guy of Warwick provides a particularly interesting example because Felice and Guy seem to shift the negotiation from love to marriage, as I discuss briefly below. rejecting suitors outright or issuing a difficult, if not impossible, condition for their hand to be won. They are usually referred to as proud or portrayed as proud in some way, they rule or are heiresses to significant lands and wealth, and they generally accept love and marriage by each romance’s conclusion. While each of these works, with the exception of Eger and Grime, is a translation or adaptation of an earlier Anglo-Norman or French romance, the linguistic, geographic, and chronological range of their French sources means that they have not been considered together, despite their similarities.5 Guy of Warwick and Ipomadon translate and adapt the Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic and Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon. Malory’s Pelleas and Ettarde episode adapts a section of the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin, while Blanchardyn and Eglantine is a translation of the fifteenth-century French prose Blancandin et l’Orgueilleuse d’amours, itself an adaptation of the thirteenth-century verse Blancandin et l’Orgueilleuse d’amour. Focusing on the adaptation of these works in Middle English romances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries illuminates the proud lady in love as a more cohesive and discrete motif, opening up new possibilities for interpretation, and bringing to light a group of romances that combines canonical texts (Guy of Warwick and Malory’s Morte) with more understudied works that tend to be dismissed as straightforward translations of French romances (such as Blanchardyn and Eglantine). The proud lady clearly comes from the French tradition, but I argue that she is an important figure in Middle English romance who offers key insights into the functions of romantic a(nti)pathy expressed by women.

The proud ladies upon whom I focus in this chapter are not the only women in Middle English romance who are hostile or indifferent to love. In addition to those considered in the previous chapter, Emelye from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale attempts to resist love but is married by the end of the narrative, while the group of haughty damsels who scorn unproven knights could also be thought of as resisting love (though they do not usually become the knights’ wives). There is also a broader conceptual link between pride and women’s rejections of love in the romance tradition. In addition to Guigemar and Amadas et Ydoine, discussed in Chapter 1, Chrétien de Troyes’s works sometimes describe women as proud when they reject love, and occasionally the women themselves indicate that they know they may be thought of as proud if they refuse a knight’s advances.6 For example, Blancheflor tells the eponymous protagonist of Perceval ‘s’ele vos ert escondite, / Vos le tendriiez a orgueil’ [‘you’d think me proud if [my love] were denied you’]: Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal, ed. by Keith Busby (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), lines 2110–11; Chrétien de Troyes, ‘The Story of the Grail (Perceval)’, in Chrétien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances, ed. & trans. by William W. Kibler (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 381–494 (p. 407). Early French lais also associate women’s resistance to love with pride, in Narcisus et Dané, the Lai du Trot, Graelent, and Doon.7 ‘Graelent’, in French Arthurian Literature IV: Eleven Old French Narrative Lays, ed. & trans. by Glyn S. Burgess and Leslie C. Brook, Arthurian Archives, 14 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 375–412 (line 218); ‘Doon’, in Eleven Old French Narrative Lays, ed. & trans. by Burgess and Brook, pp. 259–73 (lines 18–36, 66). This association recurs in the later Belle dame sans mercy tradition, where the lady is sometimes referred to as proud, though she is primarily described as cruel.8 References to pride include Alain Chartier, ‘La belle dame sans mercy’, trans. by Joan E. McRae et al., in Alain Chartier, The Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy, ed. by McRae (London: Routledge, 2014; first publ. Taylor & Francis, 2004), pp. 43–95 (lxxxv. 680); Baudet Herenc, ‘Accusations against the Belle dame sans mercy’, in Alain Chartier, The Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy, ed. & trans. by McRae, pp. 127–68 (xxv. 198, xxvi. 202, 204, 207); Achilles Caulier, ‘The Cruel Woman in Love’, in Alain Chartier, The Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy, ed. & trans. by McRae, pp. 229–93 (civ. 828). These associations are often brief, sometimes having little to no narrative impact, but such cursory references suggest that presenting women’s resistance to love as a form of pride would be widely understood. Although these references are particularly common in French texts, the appearance of the proud ladies I discuss in this chapter in the Middle English tradition, together with the circulation of several of the French texts mentioned above in medieval England, suggests that the conceptual link between women’s romantic a(nti)pathy and pride would have been recognised by medieval English readers.9 For example, the Anglo-Norman works Guigemar and Amadas et Ydoine. Chrétien’s works seem to have been known in England: Perceval and Yvain both influenced Middle English adaptations or retellings, and there are indications that his other works were known, too. See Michelle Szkilnik, ‘Medieval Translations and Adaptations of Chrétien’s Works’, in A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, ed. by Norris J. Lacy and Joan Tasker Grimbert (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 202–13 (pp. 206–7); Keith Busby, ‘The Manuscripts of Chrétien’s Romances’, in A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes, pp. 64–75 (pp. 67, 68, 70). This preconditions interpretation of women’s resistance to love by presenting it in a negative light: pride is, of course, one of the seven deadly sins, commonly represented in medieval literature and cultural artefacts, and thus a point of reference readily available to medieval readers. Names or references that associate women’s resistance to love with pride already indicate their ideological orientation, identifying these women as departing from a generic norm in a negative way. This goes against the attention to women’s shamefastness Mary Flannery has observed in other literary genres, and indeed the wider cultural valuation of female chastity and virginity; in romances, women who guard themselves from love are usually viewed negatively.10 Mary C. Flannery, Practising shame: Female honour in later medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). The negative implications of pride and its specific connection with women’s romantic a(nti)pathy suggest that this is seen as an especially problematic form of resistance to love, according with the gendered contrasts discussed in the previous chapter. As the motif of the proud lady in love makes the ideological stakes of women’s romantic a(nti)pathy particularly clear, it is the focus of this chapter.

As in the previous chapter, I explore each work in turn to evaluate the nuanced functions of individual examples of romantic a(nti)pathy. I trace the proud ladies through Middle English romance in a broadly chronological trajectory, though I combine my discussion of Ipomadon and Blanchardyn and Eglantine because of their particularly close similarities. For each romance, I explore the extent to which the proud lady’s resistance provokes anxieties about women’s autonomy, the sometimes fragile construction of masculinity in romance, and the challenging of generic norms and expectations. I also evaluate to what degree these anxieties are resolved by the (usually) normative ending. The proud ladies can be seen as forming a kind of spectrum, with some functioning more conservatively and others raising more subversive questions and possibilities. While the proud lady is usually a figure of female autonomy, this is not necessarily threatening if she uses her power in ways that accord with dynastic priorities or the promotion of chivalric masculinity, as is the case with Felice in Guy of Warwick. But in the other works discussed in this chapter, the proud ladies can be seen as raising questions about the prerogative of male rule or the celebration of chivalric masculinity. The reliance upon forms of coercion to bring about the ‘happy ending’ in many of these narratives suggests the forceful containment of the proud lady and thereby indicates the potential for disruption she embodies. These romances exhibit a marked and sometimes forceful drive to reintegrate the proud lady into the normative expectations of romance and secular society, but in most cases their conventional endings do not entirely erase the questions posed by the proud lady’s initial resistance to love.