‘She knoweth nat his condicioun’: Geography, Culture, and Prejudice in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale
The late fourteenth-century
Man of Law’s Tale is ‘Chaucer’s sole textual confrontation with medieval Christianity’s strongest religious rival, Islam’.
1 ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, line 271; Susan Schibanoff, ‘Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Antifeminism, and Heresy in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale’, in Chaucer’s Cultural Geography, ed. by Kathryn L. Lynch (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 248–80 (pp. 248–9; first publ. in Exemplaria, 8 (1996), 59–96). This tale is slightly at odds with the other works discussed in this chapter, for although it is sometimes thought of as a crusading romance,
2 For example, in Whitaker, ‘Race and Racism’. it can also be considered a hagiographical romance, and it lacks the overt military violence directed at a Muslim population
because they are Muslim characteristic of crusading works (military violence still exists but is motivated by the Sultana’s attack on the Christians).
3 See Manion’s definitions of crusading romances: Lee Manion, Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 7–8. The approach to race is, accordingly, somewhat different, as the Sultan of Syria is here no fearful military leader threatening a Christian population but rather a courteous man who rules in a parliamentary style and converts to Christianity for Custance.
4 For discussion of how the political styles of different rulers in The Man of Law’s Tale contribute to race-making, see Whitaker, ‘Race and Racism’. While
The Man of Law’s Tale maintains the perception of white Christians as desirable to Muslims, its attention to religious race differs. The Sultan’s conversion prompts questions about ‘the success or failure of religious conversion as a
techne to effect racial transformation’, leading to consideration of other ways in which a convert might be racialised as different to a white Christian.
5 Heng, The Invention of Race, p. 7.The Man of Law’s Tale once again constructs ‘an ideology of white beauty’, as the Sultan falls in love with ‘faire Custance’ (245), while she is reluctant to marry him even though he has agreed to convert for her. His offer acknowledges the centrality of shared faith in contemporary requirements for marriage as, in an episode unique to Chaucer’s version of the tale,
6 In Trevet and Gower, the Sultan declares he will convert without consulting his council or giving them the opportunity to express reservations. the Sultan’s council foresee ‘swich difficultee’,
By cause that ther was swich diversitee
Bitwene hir bothe lawes […]
They trowe that no ‘Cristen prince wolde fayn
Wedden his child under oure lawe sweete’. (218–23)
Interfaith relationships are acknowledged to be problematic in Islamic as well as Christian law (as is also the case in
The King of Tars, lines 404–14), but the Sultan’s solution is to give up his own faith and volunteer to convert his people. This evokes the kind of Christian fantasy that might well conclude a romance, but Custance’s resistance to marrying the Sultan challenges this conversion fantasy, identifying him as undesirable despite his changed faith.
7 See, for example, The King of Tars, Sir Isumbras, and Amoryus and Cleopes. Custance’s doubts do not revolve explicitly around the efficacy of conversion, as apart from a general reference to ‘the Barbre nacioun’ (281) she does not mention the Sultan’s religious beliefs as a reason to be anxious about marrying him. Instead, she is reluctant to leave her home and family, lamenting to her parents ‘ne shal I nevere seen yow moore with ye’ (280). But her distress does juxtapose her familiar context with the unknown and foreign nature of the Sultan and the lands he inhabits, illuminating alternative forms of race-making beyond the emphasis on religion in
The King of Tars.
Chaucer and his main source for
The Man of Law’s Tale, Nicholas Trevet’s
Cronicles, emphasise the differences of custom and geographical origin between Custance and the Sultan. In Trevet, Constance is sent ‘hors de sa conoissaunce entre estranges barbaryns a grant deol et
lermes et crie et noyse et plente de tote la cité de Rome’ [from ‘her acquaintances among foreign barbarians with great grief, tears, outcry, noise and lament from the whole city of Rome’].
8 Nicholas Trevet, ‘De la noble femme Constance’, ed. & trans. by Robert M. Correale, in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel, 2 vols (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), ii, 297–329 (lines 67–8, trans. p. 300). Gower’s ‘Tale of Constance’, another of Chaucer’s sources, does not describe any sadness upon Constance’s departure. See John Gower, ‘Tale of Constance’, in Confessio Amantis, ed. by Russell A. Peck, TEAMS, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003), ii, ii. 587–1612. It is now largely agreed that Gower’s version pre-dates Chaucer’s: see Peter Nicholson, ‘The Man of Law’s Tale: What Chaucer Really Owed to Gower’, Chaucer Review, 26.2 (1991), 153–74. This presents the Sultan as different from the citizens of Rome despite his conversion but conveys this in general terms rather than reflecting Constance’s point of view. In
The Man of Law’s Tale, on the other hand, it is ‘Custance, that was with sorwe al overcome’ (264) on the day of her departure, and Chaucer describes her emotions with sympathy and pathos, asking
Allas, what wonder is it thogh she wepte,
That shal be sent to strange nacioun,
Fro freendes that so tendrely hire kepte,
And to be bounden under subjeccioun
Of oon, she knoweth nat his condicioun? (267–71)
The ‘strange nacioun’ and unknown nature of the Sultan, in addition to her separation from friends and family, cause Custance’s distress. Geographical origin played a constitutive role in medieval race-making, as writers like Isidore of Seville and Bartholomeus Anglicus argued that aspects of human difference such as skin colour, behaviour, and the humours were influenced by the varied climates of different geographies.
9 See Akbari, Idols in the East, pp. 41–50. Custance’s doubts about the Sultan’s ‘condicioun’ are not borne out within the tale, as the rare phrases that characterise the Sultan describe his ‘benigne curteisye’ and ‘good chiere’ (179–80). These descriptions could equally apply to Christian knights, suggesting the Sultan may indeed share the ‘
sine qua non of Christianity and chivalry’ across which race can ‘be bridged’.
10 Heng, The Invention of Race, p. 207. However, more time is dedicated to conveying Custance’s fear about what the Sultan may be like than to narrating what he actually
is like: the tale effectively endorses prejudice on the basis of geographical origins through its sympathy with Custance. Such sympathy may also operate in accordance with epidermal race, as the description of Custance as ‘ful pale’ (265) perhaps pinpoints her white skin as an implicit contrast to her future husband’s. Whitaker notes that the tale ‘does not proclaim its sultan’s blackness, but it does not disavow it either’, suggesting that the delayed indication of the Sultan’s blackness in
The King of Tars may imply that ‘medieval readers might very well have assumed the Muslim sultan’s blackness – whether it is stated or not’.
11 Whitaker, ‘Race and Racism’. Whether or not Custance’s paleness evokes the Sultan’s own skin colour as an implied contrast, the intersection of ‘affect, religion, race, and sex’ in paleness seems to invite the (pale) audience of
The Man of Law’s Tale to sympathise not only with Custance’s plight but with her suspicion of a ‘strange nacioun’ and its unknown people.
12 Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Pale Faces: Race, Religion, and Affect in Chaucer’s Texts and Their Readers’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 23 (2001), 19–41 (p. 27).That Custance remains reluctant to marry the Sultan despite his conversion suggests that anxiety about Christian women marrying Muslim men persists even in instances where the men have converted. While this may reflect conversion anxieties, it may also indicate the separation of religion from race, if we see the anxieties that remain as motivated by a form of racial difference that is no longer tied to the Sultan’s religious identity. Heng explores this possibility, concluding that it is epidermal race that establishes the Sultan as different here.
13 Heng, Empire of Magic, pp. 226–37. Drawing upon the contrast between Custance’s relationship with the Sultan and with Alla (a pagan convert to Christianity), Heng argues that ‘conversion to Christianity is insufficient
in and of itself to cancel out differences of race and color’.
14 Ibid., p. 232. See also Ramey, Black Legacies, p. 83. The insights Heng traces through the doubled role of the husband in this narrative share some similarities with Hall’s discussion of the workings of desire, marriage, and racism in Lady Mary Wroth’s manuscript continuation of
The Countess of Montgomerie’s Urania (c. 1620–30). Although reflecting a different context, where Rodomandro is much more explicitly racialised, there are some parallels between these works. In
Urania, Rodomandro marries Pamphilia but then dies, leaving her to marry her true love. Hall argues that Rodomandro’s ‘blackness thereby marks that secondary status as if to assure the reader that the marriage is only temporary’, offering ‘a visual cue that he will never win Pamphilia’s love or desire as it is valued in the romance’.
15 Hall, Things of Darkness, pp. 206, 207. While the Sultan is not described as black, if medieval English readers perceived him as racialised – whether through his skin colour, his former religion, or his geographical and cultural differences from Custance and the Roman Christians – in a way that Alla is not, this may also have positioned him as only a temporary husband for Custance.
Rodomandro also offers a further parallel to Custance and the Sultan, as his son with Pamphilia ‘dies shortly after Rodomandro […] leaving no material trace of the marriage’.
16 Ibid., p. 208. This again resonates with Heng’s discussion of the contrast between Custance’s relationship with the Sultan and with Alla, the first abruptly ended before it can be consummated and the second consummated and resulting in a son.
17 Heng, Empire of Magic, pp. 227, 223. The consummation of Custance’s marriage to Alla is narrated oddly by the Man of Law, as he attempts to balance Custance’s ‘hoolynesse’ (713) with the need to ‘take in pacience at nyght / Swiche manere necessaries’ as her husband deems fit (710–11). This reflects the generic hybridity of the tale itself, its hagiographical content steering it towards this genre’s emphasis on chastity and virginity, while the romance framework calls for Custance and Alla’s love and dynasty to be continued through the birth of an heir. The hagiographical resonances perhaps underlie an apparent aversion to sex both from the Man of Law
and on the part of Custance: both figures could be read as asexual, though Custance could alternatively be seen as queer or lesbian, given her intense love for Hermengyld.
18 Karma Lochrie has commented on this as an intense friendship, while Daisy Black’s critical and creative work has explored the queer or lesbian potential of their connection: Lochrie, ‘Between women’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. by Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 70–88 (pp. 74–5); Black, ‘“Diverse women said diverse things…”: Storytelling, Research, and Shipping Custance and Hermengyld’ (presented at Leeds International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2021); Black, ‘Broken Shells’ (performed at ‘Gender and Aliens’, the annual Gender and Medieval Studies Conference, Durham University, 2019) <https://daisyblack.uk/storytelling/> [accessed 30 September 2022]. But while the Man of Law negotiates the consummation scene awkwardly, he nonetheless
does narrate it, again contrasting with the situation of Custance and the Sultan. Although there is no direct relationship between
The Man of Law’s Tale and the
Urania, reading the resonances between these two narratives reveals the persistent forms of racism and erasure that affect interracial relationships.
The portrayal of the Sultana, whose violence prevents the consummation of Custance and the Sultan’s marriage, is also revealing for the process of race-making and its entanglement with perceptions of gender. The Man of Law castigates the Sultana right from her first appearance, rebuking her as the
roote of iniquitee!
Virago, thou Semyrame the secounde!
O serpent under femynynytee,
Lik to the serpent depe in helle ybounde!
O feyned womman, al that may confounde
Vertu and innocence, thurgh thy malice,
Is bred in thee, as nest of every vice!
O Sathan, envious syn thilke day
That thou were chaced from oure heritage,
Wel knowestow to wommen the olde way!
[…]
Thou wolt fordoon this Cristen mariage.
Thyn instrument so – weylawey the while! –
Makestow of wommen, whan thou wolt bigile. (358–71)
This condemnation repeatedly focuses on the Sultana’s gender, deploying misogynistic ideas about the associations between Satan and women, women and sin. This is also true of the later condemnation of Donegild, the second ‘evil mother-in-law’ figure in
The Man of Law’s Tale. She is identified as ‘ful of tirannye’ (696) from her first appearance, and some of the language used to describe her also seems gendered, such as the ‘venym’ (891) of her deed, perhaps recalling the serpent metaphor used for the Sultana. However, while both mothers-in-law are portrayed negatively, indicating anxieties about the figure of the mother-in-law such as feature in other accused queen narratives rather than specifically racialised portrayals, condemnations of the Sultana also subtly differ from those of Donegild.
19 Cheuelere Assigne and Octavian, for example, depict the mother-in-law as the false accuser. Comparisons between the Sultana and the devil may draw upon prejudices about race and religion, as in
The Prioress’s Tale Chaucer similarly invokes the devil as the motivator for the Jews’ murder of the young boy.
20 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Prioress’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 209–12 (lines 558–66). The reference to Semiramis – an Assyrian queen who was sometimes said to have seized power from her husband (or to have done so after his death) – could also be motivated by race as well as gender. The Sultana thus seems to receive additional, racially motivated condemnation compared with Donegild. However, the portrayal of both mothers-in-law is united in the way the Man of Law simultaneously presents them negatively through gendered stereotypes and questions their femininity. The Sultana is called a ‘Virago’ (a standard antifeminist term, as Susan Schibanoff notes) and ‘feyned womman’, while Donegild is ‘mannysh’.
21 ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, lines 359, 362, 782; Schibanoff, ‘Worlds Apart’, p. 253. These terms may open up the question of what a woman is or should be, in contrast to her feigned or ‘mannysh’ counterpart, contrasting the mothers-in-law to Custance. The misogynistic association between women and sin has its opposite and counterpart in the perception that women should be characterised by ‘vertu and innocence’, like Custance. While this contrast applies to both mothers-in-law, it may have specifically racist associations insofar as it draws upon the long-standing Western perception of white women’s ‘sanctioned victim status’, in contrast to the construction of women of colour as illegible victims, even (here) as themselves agents of violence.
22 Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars, p. 14. Both in itself and in the contrast with Custance, the portrayal of the Sultana combines misogyny and racism, as becomes evident in comparison with Donegild. This dual focus may recall and shed light upon Custance’s resistance to loving the Sultan as a reflection of racist and misogynistic anxieties about white women marrying into Muslim society.
Custance’s initial reluctance, the emphasis on foreign customs and distant geographical origins, the avoidance of consummation, and the portrayal of the Sultana indicate the imbrication of (un)desirability with race and racism in The Man of Law’s Tale. There is explicit and repeated anxiety about Custance’s marriage to the Sultan despite his conversion, suggesting that relationships between Christian women and (formerly) Muslim men are a significant concern for medieval Christian writers. In the works that deal with Christian men’s relationships with Muslim (or formerly Muslim) women – Sir Bevis of Hampton, Sir Ferumbras, and The Sowdone of Babylone – there is much less explicit concern about race, and any anxieties associated with such partners tend to coalesce around different issues, reducing the importance of race (religious or otherwise) in hierarchies of desire.