In the course of a rebuttal of the charge of incest so often levelled by pagans against the early Christians because of their mysterious love-feasts, Minucius Felix, writing in the late second century, reminds his pagan interlocutor that classical legends and literature are full of stories of the promiscuous behaviour of both gods and mortals:
Merito igitur incestum penes vos saepe deprehenditur, semper admittitur. Etiam nescientes, miseri, potestis in inlicita proruere: dum Venerem promisce spargitis, dum passim liberos seritis, dum etiam domi natos alienae misericordiae frequenter exponitis, necesse est in vestros recurrere, in filios inerrare. Sic incesti fabulam nectitis, etiam cum conscientiam non habetis.1
(It is no surprise, then, that among you incest is often discovered and is a constant occurrence. Even without knowing it, you wretches, you can run headlong into the illicit: while spreading love about in casual affairs, while making children here, there and everywhere, while you are often exposing even those born at home to the mercy of strangers, it is inevitable that you should come back to your own, that you happen on your own children. Thus you weave a tale of incest without even realizing it.)
From our perspective today, this comment on attitudes to the exposure of children in early Christian Europe is strikingly lacking in family feeling, protective instinct, and reverence for life; it is also an accurate synopsis of an age-old literary plot, in which an exposed child is found, grows up, and unwittingly marries his/her parent.2
The last sentence of the quotation suggests that the writer was aware of the literary relevance of his argument: ‘Sic incesti fabulam nectitis (thus you weave a tale of incest).’ Mysteries about identity and birth are staples of fiction in all lands and centuries, and so are recognition scenes in which the foundling hero turns out to be the long-lost son of the king or queen.3 In some stories he has already married his unrecognized mother, and here the recognition scene acts as the peripeteia of the plot, rather than the finale; such stories cannot end, as many quests for identity do, with the happy reunion of the hero and his parents. In the Oedipus story, for instance, the recognition leads to disaster all round: Oedipus’ abdication, Jocasta’s suicide, the civil war between their sons, and the end of the royal family of Thebes.
Incest stories were doubtless circulating orally in western Europe in the early Middle Ages (and the late Latin Historia Apollonii was widely known in written form); but they begin to appear in written texts in increasing numbers from the twelfth century on, when the popular fabula, simultaneously shockingand intriguing, was harnessed and put to didactic use. This was not merely because of the growing audience for Latin and vernacular narrative fiction in this period, though of course the ‘rise of romance’, a genre with a strong interest in identity and recognition scenes and in the psychology of love, must have been acontributing factor.
Incest was a very topical subject in the twelfth century because of the Church’s attempts to define marriage in precise legal terms, and to impose a very elaborate set of rules about who could marry whom. There was also a new emphasis in this period on the importance of contrition, inner consciousness of guilt and repentance, and also on the value of confession; the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 required all Christians to go to confession at least once a year. Incest seems to have been the sin of choice in stories featuring what Payen calls ‘le motif du péché monstrueux’ (the motif of the monstrous sin); these stories show that even the most heinous behaviour can be forgiven through God’s grace if the sinner is truly repentant.4
The Oedipus story was retold in the Middle Ages, but not as often as might have been expected, given the popularity of incest stories from the twelfth century on. One reason for the comparative neglect of Oedipus may be that for medieval audiences the violent reactions of Oedipus and Jocasta would have been a prime example of accidia, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the fatal despair which turns the victim away from God, from hope and repentance and grace, and leads to death and damnation.5
The classical setting and tragic ending of the Oedipus story would have emphasized the antiquity of the problem, and the remoteness of the story from the Christian world. It was more advantageous for the Church, and more impressive for medieval audiences, to have the incest theme in a Christian context, and either in a nearcontemporary setting (such as the legend of the apocryphal Pope Gregory), or in a pseudo-historical one (such as the legend of Judas). In didactic narratives from the twelfth century on, consummated mother–son incest is usually followed by religious conversion instead of the suicides or metamorphoses found in classical stories (except in the case of irredeemable villains such as Judas); the initial prophecy of disaster may be retained or not depending on the effect desired.6 In later vernacular romances, mother–son incest is one of the possible dangers facing the foundling heroes in search of their origins; but the fatal consummation is usually avoided, and there is no explicit moral or religious interpretation. When the incestuous marriage is averted in the nick of time (and the parricide too), the stories are merely titillating and cliff-hanging romances; when mother–son incest does occur, the story becomes an exemplum not about the inevitability of fate, but rather about the sinfulness of mankind, the value of contrition and penance, and the possibility of divine forgiveness.
The classical combination of prophecy and fate takes a new form, since room has to be left for the good effects of contrition and penance and also for the unpredictable workings of divine grace. When the focus is on the mother rather than the son, many conventional elements of the Oedipus pattern are omitted altogether.
In this chapter I do not attempt to survey all the examples of mother–son incest in medieval literature, or to discuss my selected texts in the detail which they deserve. Instead I shall suggest the range of treatments of the theme from the twelfth century to the sixteenth, the various genres in which it appears, the audiences addressed, and the attitudes to incest which are revealed. The texts will all be ones in which mother–son incest is central. Issues to be discussed will include the main focus of each text (the mother or the son), the degree of sympathy for the various protagonists, the extent to which ecclesiastics are involved in the plot, and the presence or absence of explicit moralizing by characters and/or narrator. I shall also consider how different generic conventions affect the use of various traditional motifs.
MEDIEVAL OEDIPUSES: JUDAS, GREGORIUS, AND THEIR LITERARY DESCENDANTS
An early and influential incest narrative which appears to be derived from the Oedipus story is the legend of Judas. Versions in both Latin and the vernaculars circulated widely from the twelfth century, if not earlier; I shall be dealing mainly with Latin narratives.
The best-known version of the story is found in the Legendaaurea of Jacobus de Voragine, a thirteenth-century collection of saints’ lives, as part of the story of St Matthias, who replaced Judas as an apostle.7 Jacobus begins and ends it with narratorial caveats as to its apocryphal and implausible nature, but he did decide to include it in his collection, and in fact it already had a considerable pedigree.
Ruben and his wife Ciborea live in Jerusalem. She is woken one night by a terrifying dream in which she bears a child so evil that he will be the downfall of his race. Nine months later Judas is born. Their horror of infanticide is outweighed by fear for their people, and they expose the baby at sea in a basket. Judas arrives at the island of Iscariot, and is found by the childless queen. She presents the boy as her own, then conceives and bears a son herself.
Judas mistreats his foster-brother; eventually the truth about his origins comes out, and Judas in shame and anger kills the younger boy. He flees to Jerusalem, where he takes service with Pilate. Pilate takes a fancy to the apples in a neighbouring orchard; Judas goes to get them for him, and in a quarrel kills the owner, who is in fact his father. Pilate rewards Judas with the dead man’s land, and also his widow. The unhappy bride recounts the various disasters in her life, and Judas realizes that he has married his mother. She suggests that Judas do penance for his sins, and he goes to Jesus for help. Jesus favours him and makes him his purse-bearer. After betraying his new master, Judas commits suicide.
Here the incest, and the parricide too, were clearly added to show what an incorrigible villain Judas was. A man capable of the supreme sin of betraying Christ was obviously the sort of person who would have committed other appalling crimes, and in the twelfth century the worst crimes imaginable (in the context of didactic literature) were killing one’s father and marrying one’s mother, extreme transgressions of the fifth, sixth, and seventh commandments. This is a good example of Frank Kermode’s comment on the development of biblical stories that ‘narrative begot character, and character begot narrative’.8 Baum comments that if there is a connection between Judas and Oedipus, then the Judas story must be a literary creation (probably by a monk) rather than a folk-derivation, since the Oedipus story did not circulate at the popular level.9
The association of incest with an unpopular figure was quite common in the classical world. But the combination of motifs—exposure, prophecy of disaster, parricide, mother–son incest—seems to be beyond the bounds of coincidence or even polygenesis. In the earliest form of the Judas legend (Baum’s Type A, found only in one twelfth-century manuscript), there are several further details which suggest a link with Oedipus: Judas’ father dreams that his unborn son will grow up to kill him, and the infant Judas’ legs are mutilated before he is exposed, creating scars which bring about the recognition scene with his mother.10
As we shall see, the combination of parricide and incest is found in various later legends, but generally it has a different thrust, as Edmunds points out: ‘Whereas the Judas legend seems to reflect a Pauline sense of human sinfulness, these other legends make a homiletic point: the efficacy of penance and the infinitude of God’s mercy.’11 The sense of human sinfulness in the story of Judas is emphasized by the many biblical echoes. The exposure of the infant Judas and his discovery by the queen of Iscariot recall the story of Moses.
The orchard and the illicit desire for apples suggest the Garden of Eden myth, and murder soon follows, as in the Genesis story of Cain and Abel, which is also echoed in Judas’ murder of his foster-brother. Judas is doomed by his role in Christian history; though he is absolved by Jesus of his incest and parricide, there can be no redemption or grace for him. Like Oedipus, he cannot escape his destiny, so the story concentrates on the villainy of the betrayer of Christ, ‘qui malus in ortu, peior in vita, pessimus extitit in fine’ (a man who was bad at birth, worse during his life, and worst of all at the end), and shows little sympathy for him.12 Axton argues that the story evokes no sympathy in any version, and Derek Brewer considers the Judas legend ‘an artistic failure’ because of the impossibility of identifying with the protagonist, the marginal role of the mother, and the consequent meaninglessness of the ‘family drama’.13
But the Judas story represents only the first stage in the medievalization of the incest theme. At the same time that Judas was credited with an incestuous marriage to his mother, the same sin was becoming increasingly associated with legendary saints and ecclesiastics in narratives which were more didactic and also more optimistic. Some of the earliest medieval mother–son incest stories occur in hagiographies rather than secular stories, and these lives often include deliberate as well as unwitting incest.14
One of the most startling innovations of medieval writers is this double incest theme: intercourse between siblings or father and daughter who are well aware of their relationship is followed by the exposure of their illegitimate son, who later quite innocently marries his unrecognized mother-aunt-sister (or, much less frequently, a mother and son who know their relationship produce a daughter who later marries her father-brother). Such double incest stories do not seem to appear in classical literature; incest, whether attempted or consummated, may recur in several generations, as in the stories of Tantalus and Thyestes, but no one commits incest twice with different family members.
Rank disapproved of this sensational use of double incest, and thought these medieval stories ‘differ displeasingly from the naive antique traditions in their voluptuous and torrid fantasies’; he attributes these medieval fantasies to the fact that ‘the great repression of drives expressed in Christianity could be maintained only at the cost of a fantasy life pouring forth to the most voluptuous degree’.15 Other explanations seem more plausible. Not only does such double incest complicate the tangle of identities and relationships and add to the tension of the recognition scenes, but it also presents a uniquely horrible form of lust, a particularly heinous sin to be confessed, repented, and expiated.
As Ohly stresses, ‘The real question is not how one gets into guilt but how one gets out of it.’16 The ability to deal with the guilt induced by such a sin and to avoid despair and damnation after such a lapse represents the extraordinary power of Christian faith and the infinite grace of God. As a further encouragement to the faithful, the heroes of these hagiographic romances are not merely absolved of their sins, but usually end their days in the odour of sanctity as admired and authoritative figures in the Christian community, remarkable examples of the workings of divine grace. In the twelfth century a new type of hagiography emerged in which great emphasis is put on individual contrition and on confession and penance, and in these stories the ‘péché monstrueux’ (monstrous sin) is often mother–son incest.17
The earliest of these stories known to us, and the source, wholly or partially, of many later ones, seems to be the legend of Gregorius. The earliest known texts of this very popular story are not in Latin but in Old French and date from about 1150; probably the best-known version is the German poem derived from them by Hartmann von Aue about 1200 (the source of Thomas Mann’s Holy Sinner), and it is on this version that I shall base my discussion, since it is one of the most fully imagined treatments of incest in medieval literature.18
On his deathbed the widowed Duke of Aquitania commends his young daughter to the care of her brother. The unmarried siblings are devoted to each other, and sleep in the same room. Tempted by the devil, the brother rapes his sister; at first she is upset, but then they enjoy an incestuous affair which is halted only by the discovery that she is pregnant. On the advice of a faithful steward, their baby boy is born in secret and exposed in a chest in a tiny boat with money, fine fabrics, and a tablet indicating his rank and the circumstances of his birth; the brother sets off on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where he soon dies. The sister, distraught at the loss of both brother and baby, becomes duchess and devotes herself to good works.
The baby’s boat is found by fishermen; their lord, an abbot, makes himself responsible for the child, and baptizes him with his own name. Gregorius is raised by the fisherman; when he enters the monastery school, he excels in his studies. His jealous foster-mother knows that he is a foundling; when Gregorius hits her own son in a quarrel, she maliciously taunts him about his origins. Gregorius goes to the abbot, and insists on being knighted. The abbot shows Gregorius the tablet, and gives him the money that was in his little boat, and clothes made from the rich fabrics. Elated by the discovery that he is of noble birth, but horrified by his conception in such sin, Gregorius sets off to seek his unfortunate parents.
Arriving by chance at his mother’s city, he finds it under siege by a duke who wishes to marry the duchess. Gregorius defeats the unwelcome suitor in single combat; the barons advise the lady to marry her new young champion, to whom she is strangely attracted. They are very happy, but every day Gregorius emerges weeping from a secret perusal of the tablet which describes his parents’ sin. A prying maid brings this to the lady’s attention; she finds the tablet, and realizes that she has married her long-lost son. Both are horrified by this revelation. Warning his mother not to abandon herself to despair, as Judas did, Gregorius rules that both must devote themselves to penance, and leaves the country at once.
He arrives after some days at a lonely fisherman’s house by a lonely lake, and asks about a suitably remote place to do penance. The fisherman rows him out to a rock, shackles him to it, and throws away the key. In his haste Gregorius loses his precious tablet. He spends seventeen years on the rock in very harsh conditions. At the end of this time, the Pope dies in Rome, and two eminent churchmen dream that his successor is to be a holy man named Gregorius, currently living on a rock in a lonely lake. They eventually come to the fisherman’s house; the key to Gregorius’ shackles appears miraculously in the fish caught for their dinner, he is freed, and the tablet is miraculously found. On the way to Rome his healing powers are demonstrated, and he becomes an admirable Pope. Gregorius’ mother, hearing of his fame but unaware of his identity, decides to go to Rome to seek absolution for her sins. Gregorius recognizes her from her confession; after an enjoyably ambiguous conversation he identifies himself. She enters a convent, and they both live piously in Rome till they die.
From beginning to end, and particularly at the beginning and the end, Gregorius is an explicitly didactic Christian poem, though Hartmann von Aue was not a cleric, and was presumably writing for a courtly lay audience.19 It is, as he repeatedly states, an exemplum of the value of repentance and of the importance of resisting despair. The two main enemies of the protagonists, and of all humankind, are the devil, prompter of the initial incest, and despair, the Deadly Sin against which Hartmann repeatedly warns his readers. Gregory is the name of a series of famous Popes; needless to say, their lives contain no episode remotely analogous to the poem, but the didactic power of the legend is obviously enhanced by the papal aura.
The traditional parricide is omitted here, perhaps to reduce Gregorius’ guilt, or perhaps to focus attention on the incest; there is a doubling not only of the incest motif but also of the recognition scene, in a way that emphasizes the shift from secular to religious values, and also the abandoning of the romance pattern. At the end of the poem, the (still unnamed) woman who was first Gregorius’ mother and then his wife hears of the reputation of the new Pope and comes to him in complete ignorance as a sinner in search of absolution. He does not recognize her until she tells her terrible tale; then he talks to her of her lost Gregorius, and finally identifies himself as son and husband (3926). But the role in which he is now cast is that of spiritual father: she has done penance, as he instructed her so many years ago, and again he must act as her moral guide.20
There is one more shift in relationships at the end, when the poet presents the two contrite and innocently reunited sinners as children of eternal God (3954). The poem begins with the death of an earthly father who leaves his children vulnerable to mortal sin by failing to arrange marriages for them. It ends with a mother and son who, after passing through a series of unnatural relationships (simultaneously mother–son and aunt– nephew, then also wife–husband), are seen at last as equals, chaste siblings in a spiritual sense under the protection of the heavenly Father (though in terms of status in this world, Gregorius as Pope is clearly well ahead of his anonymous mother in her convent).
Hartmann’s poem is a hagiographic romance, not a theological treatise. Christian ethics are everywhere apparent, but there is a notable absence of ecclesiastical advisers at crucial moments, and the protagonists never make formal confessions. It is the faithful steward who gives sound advice to the incestuous siblings about pilgrimage and penance (and about disposing of the baby); and Gregorius himself, driven by his overpowering sense of sin, chooses appropriate penances for his mother and himself without any professional help. The ambiguous treatment of some of the main theological issues can be judged by the continuing scholarly controversy over the distribution of guilt in the Gregorius. Was the mother initially at fault in not resisting her brother’s advances? Was Gregorius wrong to leave the monastery and pursue worldly ambition?
Is ignorance an excuse for incest? Was the newborn Gregorius tainted with his parents’ sin? Christians were divided on the principles underlying this last point. According to Ezekiel 18: 20, ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father’; but God declared Himself to Moses to be a jealous god, ‘visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fouth generation’ (Exodus 20: 5). For Tobin the poem reflects an Augustinian pessimism about original sin: ‘since Gregorius falls into the same sin of incest as his parents, it may well be that the story supposes a widespread knowledge of the dictum that God punishes those who imitate the sins of their fathers’.21 Mancinelli, on the other hand, thinks that Hartmann was more sympathetic to the Abelardian position that intention is a crucial part of sin; for her, the phrase so frequently used of Gregorius, ‘der guote sündaere’ (the good sinner), demonstrates Hartmann’s belief in his protagonist’s innocence.22
Hartmann’s signals are ambiguous: at the birth of Gregorius both his mother and the steward’s wife agree that he is born in appalling sin (688–90), but the abbot makes no reference to this when Gregorius is found in the sea. When Gregorius learns of the circumstances of his birth, his reaction is divided between distress at the sinfulness of his conception—though he notes that he is not to blame—and delight in his nobility and wealth (1748–55, 1777–84). He is knighted and sets out to find his parents, accepting chivalric adventure on the way; yet later he subjects himself to a penance much more ferocious than would have been required by contemporary ecclesiastical practice.23 Hartmann’s Gregorius was translated into Latin by the Benedictine abbot Arnold of Lübeck for William of Lüneburg in the early thirteenth century.24
He inserted two categorical assurances that the sins of the parents are not visited on the children (I. 380 ff. and II. 945 ff.), and in his prologue gives a more encouraging quotation from Romans 5: 20: ‘But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.’25 In the view of K. C. King, ‘Hartmann’s purpose is not to criticize the behaviour of either mother or son, nor, particularly, the mode of life which could lead such “good” people into such sin; it is to show that where there is true repentance forgiveness is never impossible.’26 K. Ruh formulates the same point succinctly and elegantly: ‘grosse Sunde—grosse Busse—grosse Gnade’ (great sin—great penance—great grace).27
It seems to be assumed that there can only be one Holy Sinner in the story. The focus is on the adventures, reactions, and penance of Gregorius, rather than of his unnamed mother, though she is the one who commits incest twice over; we are told briefly of her good works but never see her in action, and at the end she is overshadowed by her son the Pope. The world which Hartmann depicts is largely a male world, and initially at least a chivalric world; when Gregorius refuses to become the abbot’s successor, he explains that during his years of education he yearned to be a knight, ‘sô turnierte mîn gedanc’ (1584: I jousted so much in my mind).
In making the apparently innocent Gregorius take on such hard penance, Hartmann—and his source—seem to be describing lay reaction to incest (albeit in an extreme and perhaps idealized form), rather than the prescribed theological view. Siegfried Christoph has argued that the Gregorius represents the clash of two value systems, the shame culture of a secular and heroic society, and the guilt culture of a religious society; he quotes Hildegard Nobel’s view that ‘the issue of an incestuous union is burdened with infamy, not sin’, and suggests that the incestuous sinners’ failure to confess is occasioned by a sense of shame and by reluctance to involve outsiders in such a dishonourable family matter.28
The sojourn on the rock can be seen as a social penance, in that it represents exile from society; the election to the papal throne is, Christoph points out, both a spiritual and a social reinstatement. Simon Gaunt, following Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, argues (with reference to the French version of the story) that the point is to show that lay society is in serious danger because it tends to break the rules about exogamic marriage established by theChurch.29 But Gregorius is quite ignorant of his incest, and by the late twelfth century intention was believed to be crucial to sin.30
Nonetheless it is very proper for him to feel the burden of sin; clearly the reader/listener is encouraged to examine his/her conscience and to worry about sin, whether deliberate or unwitting.31 The ‘happy ending’ for Gregorius entails ‘his rejection of lay social structures and of the lay aristocratic model of masculinity’, according to Gaunt.32 Unlike Oedipus and Jocasta, Gregorius and his mother have no children; it is tempting to see the story at one level as an attack on sex and marriage, and as propaganda for the celibate life.
Legros argues that the Gregorius condemns all bonds of family kinship, which are an obstacle to saintliness, and emphasizes the superiority of spiritual relationships: ‘Grégoire doit, pour atteindre à la perfection, échapper au poids d’une parenté pourtant réduite à des relations de consanguinité ou d’alliances directes: frère/soeur, ses parents, mère/fils, son épouse’ (To attain perfection, Gregorius must escape the weight of a kinship which is reduced to consanguinous relationships or actual marriage: his parents are brother and sister, his wife is his mother).33
The Gregorius suggests an alternative set of values for romance narrative, a clash between worldly and spiritual standards and ambitions, just as the invention of the Grail Quest introduced a problematic new value system into the Arthurian world.34 If the Gregorius contains a mixture of theological and lay attitudes, what can we glean from it about contemporary reactions to incest? It is striking that Hartmann shows considerable sympathy for the young girl raped by her brother; he describes her hesitating between bringing dishonour on her brother by calling for help or sinning with him, an impossible choice between shame and guilt in which vicarious shame wins (385 ff.).
But she is not shown simply as a victim of rape; though incest is clearly unacceptable, it is not presented as something which only subhuman barbarians do, nor is it simply a matter of violent sex. Once the affair has begun, Hartmann seems to have no difficulty in imagining that the siblings really do love each other (like Canace and Macareus) in spite of the horror of the situation. When the brother leaves for the Holy Land, both he and his sister are devastated (639 ff.). When the infant Gregorius is exposed at sea, the poet apologizes for his inability to describe adequately the mother’s grief, which he characterizes as triple: she grieves for her sin with her brother and her parting from him, for her frail state after childbirth, and for the exposure of her child (789 ff.).35
Her brother feels as passionately as she does, for he dies of a broken heart. Hartmann remarks that though women’s love is said to be more intense than men’s, it is not so, as this example proves (842–4). The mother’s meeting years later with her unrecognized son and her growing feeling for him are also sympathetically described. Hartmann explains at some length that it is the practical arguments of the barons which persuade her to marry Gregorius (she needs a champion, like Laudine in Chrétien’s Yvain, which Hartmann also translated), but they do love each other greatly. Considerable space is given to her anxiety at the news of her lord’s secret sorrow, and her horror at the revelation of his origins.
Both the mother and Gregorius are allowed to comment on the situation themselves: there is no narratorial moralizing on the sidelines. The devil is given some credit for the attraction between mother and son, and for the lady’s decision to marry; and when the tablet reveals the dreadful truth, she laments that God has allowed the devil to trap her yet again. But Hartmann is more interested in maintaining the narrative tension than in delivering fierce moralizing asides about human frailty, and he puts much less emphasis on the role of the devil than does his French source. He includes much dialogue and gives plenty of space to the drama of the recognition scenes (as does the French version). Few later writers spend as much imagination and space on the emotions of the characters, particularly in the recognition scenes, or deal with their lapses so sympathetically.
Though Gregorius’ extreme reaction to his unwitting incest seems to emphasize original sin and man’s fallen state, the point of the story is not to denounce human weakness and appetite, but to celebrate the power of remorse and penance, and the infinite mercy of God. The double incest certainly represents the lowest depths to which human carnality can sink, depths abhorred by both God and man; but the characters retain their nobility and the reader’s sympathy throughout. Gregorius’ behaviour up to the time when the incest is discovered and his ignorance of the sin he is committing help to exonerate him, whereas Judas’ earlier villainy and violence cancel out his ignorance of his blood relationship with his new wife. The prophecy found in the stories of Oedipus and Judas disappears in the story of Gregorius, who does not kill his father, and whose fate is not explicitly linked to that of his family or people.
A further innovation is the happy ending, of course: by renouncing secular life and marriage, and by doing penance, the protagonist is able to achieve social acceptance and ecclesiastical power in the end as a ‘holy sinner’. The parricide in the Judas story which reminds us of Oedipus is not present in the Gregorius; although the father is removed from the scene early on, he dies of natural causes.
Incest and parricide are both present, together with prophecy and a spiritually happy ending, in a narrative which is clearly a combination of the Judas and Gregorius stories, the legend of St Andreas of Crete.36
A merchant receives a prophecy that his wife will bear a son who will kill his father, marry his mother, and rape three hundred nuns. When their son is born they mutilate his body and expose him in a little boat. He is found and raised by a community ofnuns; one day, in a fit of lust inspired by the devil, he rapes three hundred of them. He is driven out and arrives in the town of Crete, where he is employed as a watchman by his natural father; neither knows their true relationship. At night his father comes disguised to the vineyard as a test, and is killed by Andreas.
Andreas then marries his mother, who subsequently recognizes him because of his scars. She sends Andreas to a priest, who refuses to absolve him. Andreas kills him, and then two more equally obstinate priests. The Bishop of Crete eventually absolves him, but imposes a severe penance on both mother and son. Andreas is chained at the bottom of a deep cellar; when it is filled with earth to the top, his sins will be forgiven. His mother has a padlock put through her nose; the key is thrown away, and she is ordered to wander through the world praising God until it is found again. After thirty years the key is miraculously found in a fish, and she goes into a convent. Andreas is found sitting on top of his cellar, which has filled up with earth. On the death of the Bishop of Crete Andreas succeeds him, and lives a most holy life.
Baum points out the parallels between this and the story of Judas: both children are of humble birth, both are predestined to commit parricide and incest, both commit violent crimes before fulfilling the prophecy, both discover their unwitting sins through mutual confession of mother and son, both are sent to a holy man to be pardoned.37 Other parts of the story of Andreas are much more reminiscent of the Gregorius: the use of the name of an historical ecclesiastic (there really was a Bishop Andreas of Crete in the seventh century), the penances for both mother and son, their eventual reunion and absolution, and the key miraculously found in a fish.
The two story patterns are neatly combined to emphasize both the characteristic violence and sinfulness of man in the extreme examples of mass rape, parricide, and incest, and also the value of Christian penance which leads to absolution and salvation. The prophecy is fulfilled, but this does not preclude a happy ending, in a Christian sense. The message is much the same as that of the Gregorius, but its content is more sensational, and the hero’s path to redemption much more violent—parricide and the rape of three hundred nuns surely outweigh the taint of sibling incest! Again the spotlight is focused throughout on the male sinner: although the mother does leave her home to carry out her penance, the story does not recount her adventures, and her absolution is not rewarded
by any special status.
Parricide and incest are also combined in a thirteenth-century legendary saint’s life which is much more heavily dependent on the Gregorius, yet contains some striking variations, the story of Saint Albanus, which Baum describes as ‘the most horrible, but also, it seems to me, the most moving of all the incest group’.38
A widowed emperor in a northern land seduces his daughter, who bears him a son. The child, Albanus, is exposed in Hungary, with a supply of rich clothes and jewels; he is adopted by the childless King of Hungary, and when grown is married to the daughter of the northern emperor, his unrecognized mother. On his deathbed the King of Hungary tells Albanus how he was found; the princess recognizes the clothes and jewels she left with him, and their incestuous relationship is revealed.
The emperor, the princess, and Albanus are ordered by a hermit to spend seven years wandering separately in penance. At the end of this time they meet again, and on the way to their hermit adviser are benighted. The emperor cannot resist the presence of his daughter, and relapses into sin. Albanus catches his parents in the act, and kills them both. After another seven years of penance he becomes a hermit. He is killed by robbers who throw his corpse into a river, where miraculous cures subsequently occur.
Here the double-incest-plus-penance pattern apparently first introduced in the Gregorius reappears, but in a new form. First, the hero is the product not of siblings whose incest is encouraged by their proximity and orphaned state, but of a deliberate father–daughter liaison. Rank argues that the initial sibling incest of the Gregorius did not satisfy the medieval imagination; father–daughter incest was more horrifying, and complicated the relationships still further in that the hero’s mother was also his sister.39
Second, the hero’s sins take the form of unwitting incest followed by deliberate parricide, the reverse of the usual Oedipus pattern where the parricide must come first to make the mother available for remarriage; this might seem to make Albanus more culpable. The circumstances of the parricide seem to bear out Edmunds’s view: ‘Parricide, then, is a morally sensitive episode in the Oedipus-type narrative, and it seems likely that the hero who is to be forgiven ought to commit a justifiable parricide.’40 Here there is no ominous prophecy, as in the stories of Judas or Andreas; the parricide is an act of righteous anger by a reformed sinner who sees his parents slipping back into their previous sin. Even if not wholly defensible, it seems much less criminal than the thuggish killing of Ruben by Judas (Andreas’ killing of his father might be partially justified by his zeal for his new job, and by his father’s rashness in coming incognito to test the new guard).41
Like the Gregorius, the legend of Albanus is an exemplum of the value of confession and penance, and the hard road to grace: like Gregorius, Albanus achieves sanctity at the end, and posthumously demonstrates healing powers. The focus here is even more firmly on the hero; his mother-sister does share his penance, but her role is both small and passive, and at the end she is killed by her son for her relapse into sin. This time the father survives almost to the end of the story; his shameful seduction of his own daughter, his failure to reform his ways, and his subsequent death at the hands of his own son serve to emphasize the weakness of the flesh and the difficulty of eradicating human sinfulness, as well as the writer’s total rejection of incest.
The author of this Latin prose life gives his characters few speeches and little individuality, but often comments himself in strict moral terms. His reaction to the father–daughter incest is typical of his general attitude: ‘O humanae libidinis effrenis impietas’ (O unrestrained wickedness of human lust). The fact that the story is told in Latin prose suggests that it is designed for a masculine and ecclesiastical audience; this impression is confirmed by the frequent misogynistic references. Phrases such as ‘ut mos est mulieribus’ (as is characteristic of women) and ‘procax mulier’ (the impudent woman) indicate the writer’s lack of sympathy for the female protagonist of his story, asdoeshis comment that it is better to admire God’s justice in making the mother anxious about her new husband’s origins than to describe her anxiety.
He is not trying to tell an elaborate storyof suspense, or to rouse the sympathyof the reader or audience for human weakness, as Hartmann does, but rather to present an explicit exemplum in resolutely black and white terms. These exempla are clearly invented to act as propaganda for the value of contrition and penance, but some incest stories purport to be based on real incidents. Such is the legend of Vergogna:42
A baron seduces his daughter. Their son is exposed as a baby, and arrives in Egypt. The baron goes on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and dies there. The daughter refuses all suitors; the neighbouring barons seize her lands, and besiege her in the convent where her father has installed her. Her son, now grown up, hears of her plight and comes to rescue her without knowing of their relationship; then he marries her. Some time after the wedding he tells her about his birth, and the awful truth is revealed. Together they go to the Pope, who orders them to do penance separately in a monastery in Rome; there they die in the odour of sanctity. They are buried in one tomb, with an inscription indicating their complex relationship: mother and son, sister and brother, wife and husband.
The inscription can be seen today in the monastery of Santa Presidia, says the writer. A number of other such riddling funerary inscriptions are recorded, including one reputedly seen near Bourbon:
"Cy-gist la fille, cy-gist le père,
Cy-gist la soeur, cy-gist le frère,
Cy-gist la femme et le mary,
Et si n’y a que deux corps ici."43
(Here lies the daughter, here lies the father, here lies the sister, here lies the brother, here lies the wife and the husband, and there are only two bodies here.)
It is impossible to say whether such inscriptions are based on real cases of double incest, or whether they are entirely apocryphal; but the records of these riddling epitaphs do suggest a popular aspect of the incest theme, as well as a more literary or didactic one. Even if the story of Vergogna is based on a real history, the name of the protagonist, which means Shame, reveals its exemplary aim. The initial father–daughter incest looks back to Albanus; the rescue of the beleaguered mother and the role of the Pope recall Gregorius, and as in the Gregorius the hero’s father fades from the story early on (both die in the Holy Land), leaving mother and son to their spiritually happy ending. No rigorous penance is demanded here; it is enough that they acknowledge their shame by confessing.
This is also the case in the variant version of the story of Gregorius included in some manuscripts of the very popular collection of exemplary stories known as the Gesta Romanorum, where the story is drastically shortened so that it omits the penance, Gregorius’ installation as Pope, and the second recognition scene.44 When Gregorius and his mother discover their incest in this version, they confess and take communion; they hear a voice absolving them, and three days later they die (in the English version they die immediately). The Latin rubric is ‘De Gregorio qui matrem duxit in uxorem’ (Of Gregorius who married his mother). In the larger group of Gesta Romanorum manuscripts edited by Oesterley, the full story is told and the rubric gives away the ending: ‘De mirabili divina dispensatione et ortu beati Gregorii papae’ (Of the miraculous dispensation of God and the origins of blessed Pope Gregory).45
In the Gesta versions, the story is set in Rome at an unspecified date: the dying father of the opening episode is the emperor. His son is more forceful in raping his sister, and Hartmann’s inner monologue in which she has to choose between public and private honour is replaced by her threat that her brother’s crime will offend God and cause disorder among men. Her increasing pleasure in the incestuous liaison is also omitted.
There is still a surprising lack of ecclesiastical comment on the sibling incest, but the sister and the faithful steward have an interesting quarrel about baptizing the child: she refuses because of its incestuous origins, while the steward urges her not to destroy the child’s soul because of her own sin. The tablets put in the baby’s boat ask the finder to baptize him.46 The chivalric aspects of the story are much reduced here. On discovering the circumstances of his birth, Gregorius sets out for the Holy Land in atonement for his parents’ sin, but is driven by a storm to his mother’s land.
There is no suggestion of growing attraction between mother and son; it is at the barons’ urgent recommendation that they marry. The first recognition scene and Gregorius’ subsequent adventures are much curtailed; there is less of the hostile fisherman and of the arrival of the Roman envoys, and the final recognition scene between mother and son is also brief.
Almost a fifth of the story is taken up by the moralization at the end, a characteristic feature of nearly all the stories in the Gesta Romanorum; these moralizations tend to be complex and may present a character as playing several apparently incompatible roles. The dying emperor is interpreted here as Christ; his son is man (also the flesh), and his daughter the soul. Their incest represents the corruption of the soul by vice; their incestuous offspring is the human race, born of corrupt parents comparable to Adam and Eve. Gregorius’ exposure by sea represents humankind’s wanderings on the sea of human misery. His mother’s unwelcome suitor is the devil; when Gregorius rescues her he is the Son of God who marries the Church, His Mother.
The abbot who rears him is God, the fisherman a prelate. Gregorius’ journey to Rome represents his return from the rock of penance to Mother Church, and then he is able to lead his mother, the soul, to the heavenly kingdom. So the story of Gregorius could be interpreted on two levels. It is in itself a cautionary tale with a positive moral: incest is the worst of carnal sins, yet the incestuous sinner can be forgiven, and can even become Pope, after sincere contrition and appropriate penance.47 But it can also be read as an allegory of the corruption and purification of the soul, and the inevitably sinful state of humankind, which can only be saved by imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ).48 The story of Albanus is similarly moralized in the Gesta Romanorum.49 Here the incestuous father is man, his daughter is his own evil will, and their offspring is wickedness.
Albanus’ adopted father is God, who through His death reveals humankind’s wickedness and sin. The seven years of penance represent the Seven Deadly Sins. The fatal relapse of Albanus’ parents represents evil will again. Finally, the reader is enjoined to turn like Albanus to a hermit-confessor, and to devote his life to penance. Incest here seems to represent original sin.
ROMANCE VERSIONS: INCEST AVERTED
The appeal of the Oedipus plot in its various permutations was not restricted to pious writers trying to improve the morals of the faithful, of course. The story has analogues from around the world which are by no means all exemplary, and in western Europe in the later Middle Ages it also appears in narratives with little or no moral agenda.50 In the beginning of the thirteenth-century Prose Tristan, for instance, the account of the Cornish dynasty to which both Tristan and Mark belong includes the sad story of Apollo l’Aventureus, who is exposed as a baby by the pagan suitor of his mother Chelinde after his father Sador has been thrown overboard by sailors as a murderer who has brought ill-fortune to their ship. 51
Apollo learns of his origins from his adoptive mother, and sets out to find his father. Sador, already mortally wounded, attacks his unrecognized son whom he has mistaken for an enemy; Apollo kills Sador (he also kills his mother’s second husband, thus fulfilling the prophecy that caused him to be exposed as an infant); then unwittingly he marries his mother Chelinde. When St Augustine reveals the truth to them, he is sent to the stake by Chelinde, but she is killed by lightning. Apollo is converted to Christianity and marries again, but he and his wife die in tragic circumstances.
This story seems intended to show that misfortune dogs the Cornish royal house, leading up to the final tragedy of Tristan, rather as in the classical stories of Oedipus and of the house of Atreus. Although a saint is involved, there is no explicit Christian moral.
It is more common to find romances which adapt the Oedipus plot and defang it, so to speak, making both parricide and incest near-miss, and concluding with an entirely secular happy ending. Such romances include a recognition scene no less exciting for the omission of the incestuous relationship. They usually begin with the exposure of a male baby conceived in a clandestine relationship, and they end with a happy reunion of parents and son, released from any danger of incest or scandal and respectably paired off to their own and everyone else’s satisfaction. In such stories it may even be the father rather than the son who is the main focus of attention, as in the fourteenth-century Middle English poem Sir Eglamour.52
Sir Eglamour is set a number of tasks by the hostile father of his beloved, Cristabelle. During this time Eglamour and Cristabelle become lovers, and she becomes pregnant. Eglamour leaves to continue his tasks, and gives Cristabelle a ring for the child. The furious father exiles Cristabelle and her baby in a tiny boat. Theyarrive at a desert island, where a griffin steals the boy and carries him to Israel; there the king adopts him and names him Degrebelle. Cristabelle arrives in Egypt, where she is protected by the king, her uncle. Eglamour returns to Artois to find her gone. Her father takes refuge in a tower, and Eglamour goes off to the Holy Land for fifteen years.
The King of Egypt offers Cristabelle in marriage to the man who can defeat him at jousting. Degrebelle, now grown up, succeeds, and marries his mother. But his crest, a griffin with a child in its claws, prompts her to inquire about his origins, and their relationship is revealed before the marriage is consummated. Cristabelle is then promised to the man who can defeat Degrebelle in a joust. Eglamour arrives and defeats his unrecognized son, but he too has a crest which provokes Cristabelle’s curiosity, a woman and child in a boat. A second recognition scene takes place, and the reunited family returns to France. Cristabelle’s father falls out of his tower and breaks his neck, Eglamour marries Cristabelle, and Degrebelle marries a princess previously turned down by his father.
This romance does not conform to the pattern of the Gregorius or Albanus legends, but it contains many characteristic features of mother–son incest stories. There is no initial incest (though the unwillingness of the old king to let his daughter marry may be a trace of an earlier Incestuous Father motif); the exposure of her baby is occasioned by illicit sex and the fear of scandal, the motives for exposures in many other incest stories. Degrebelle is exposed in a boat, though accompanied by his mother (a motif we shall encounter frequently in the Incestuous Father romances and the Constance group; then he is separated from her and raised by a foster-father. He sets out not to find his parents but to acquire a wife, at the urging of his foster father; like Gregorius, he wins his mother’s hand through his prowess as a knight.
In the recognition scene his identity is proved by the clothes found with him as a baby; the ring which Eglamour left for him is never mentioned again, though it may have contributed to the recognition in an early version of the story. But it is the father rather than the son who is the focus of the story (as in the case of Arthur and Mordred discussed below). Eglamour is given a number of chivalric adventures which have nothing to do with his wife or son—hence the princess whom Degrebelle eventually marries—and the story is not complete until he returns to reclaim Cristabelle. The reunion and marriage of these long-separated lovers eclipses the recognition scene between mother and son (both recognitions occur through the rather clumsy repetition of the telltale crest). This is a totally chivalric tale, and like most romances it has a happy ending for both generations. No priests are present in this story because there is nothing for the protagonists to confess, except the initial fornication, a very common sin in chivalric romance which does not usually require formal absolution.
Cristabelle’s hostile father dies at the end, but not at the hand of any of the protagonists; his death is not a deliberate punishment, but merely the deserved removal from the scene of an unpleasant and obstructive character. The near-miss incest is a titillating incident, but the turning-point of the story is the combat of father and son, a frequent theme in medieval narratives (and in many others).53 We hear little about Cristabelle’s feelings. The emphasis throughout the story is on chivalric prowess and its male exponents.
This chivalric emphasis is even more clearly present in the fourteenth-century Middle English Sir Degaré, which offers some interesting variations on the familiar theme.54
A widowed king does not want his daughter to marry. She is raped in the forest by a fairy knight, who leaves her a sword without a tip for the son she will bear. When she gives birth to a boy she exposes him with a letter round his neck, a large sum of money, and a pair of gloves sent by the fairy knight with the instructions that the boy must marry only the woman who can wear them. He is found and reared by a hermit who names him Degaré [meaning either ‘ignorant of himself’ or ‘lost’].
Meanwhile the princess becomes the prize offered to any knight who can defeat her father in battle. When Degaré is 20 he is told that he is a foundling and given the tokens which were left with him; he sets off to find his parents. After some adventures he defeats an old knight in battle, and wins his daughter. They marry in church, but before they sleep together he remembers to make hertry on the gloves, and so discovers that she is his mother; the marriage is annulled.
Degaré inquires about his father; his mother gives him the fairy knight’s sword, and Degaré sets out to find him. He fights an unknown knight who asks about the sword and turns out to have the missing tip; it is his father. His parents are reunited and marry, and Degaré marries a lady he championed in a previous battle. Here there is a deliberate search for the hero’s parents, as in the Gregorius, but the motives are social rather than religious. When Degaré and his mother discover their true relationship, the narrator comments that anyone proposing to marry a stranger far from home should always be careful to enquire about the future spouse’s family first, in case they turn out to be related (617–24); but overall the story is clearly not intended to be a cautionary tale with an explicit moral about incest.
The recognition tokens (one for each parent) are introduced in such a way as to ruin the suspense for the reader by foreshadowing the two recognition scenes. The rapist leaves a sword with his victim for their unborn son, explaining thathe is keeping the tip (broken in a fight with a giant) which may help him to recognize his son should they meet in the future (115–32).The princess keeps the sword with her, but when she exposes Degaré she puts in his cradle the gloves sent from fairyland by her attacker, and instructs her son in the accompanying letter that the woman he loves must be able to wear them, adding that they will fit only his mother (215–19 ). She seems to be anticipating their incest and the saving recognition scene, just as the fairy knight anticipates combat with his son.
As in Sir Eglamour, the pattern of events is the reverse of the Oedipus plot: the marriage with the unrecognized mother precedes the battle with the unrecognized father, which is clearly the crucial turning-point. The encounter with his father is Degaré’s fourth and final battle; his prowess has increased with each adventure, and proving himself the equal of his father is the final test of his maturity as a knight. The lives of both father and son are incomplete until they find each other. The symbolism of the broken sword tip is striking: the unifying of the sword pieces can be seen as symbolizing not only Degaré’s establishment of his identity and reputation, and his sexual maturity, but also the unifying of his family which is necessary to legitimize the erstwhile foundling. The masculine and martial nature of the symbol makes the priorities of the writer crystal clear, as does the fact that the heroine is marginalized once she has had her baby, and spends twenty years as an unclaimed tournament prize before being handed over to an unknown youth who has won her in battle. Although it is a Bildungsroman for Degaré, the frame story focuses on his parents, as in Sir Eglamour.
In both romances the son seems sidelined at the end by the happy reunion of his parents who are now free to marry (the rapist fairy of the beginning seems to have metamorphosed into a respectable mortal knight).
James Simpson comments on Degaré that ‘a father’s incestuous and violent possessiveness of his daughter is the transgression that drives this narrative’, and that more near-miss transgression is necessaryto reach a happy ending not just for the individual but for the whole kin-group: ‘Degaré must nearly kill his grandfather, must nearly sleep with his mother, and must nearly kill his father before proper relations can be established between and within generations.’ 55 The near-miss incest and parricide are also muted, though in different ways, in other analogous narratives of this period, such as Richars li Biaus.56 Here another possessive and potentially incestuous king locks his daughter up in a tower, where she is raped by an unknown knight. When Richars is born, his grandfather orders servants to kill the infant, but instead they expose him and he is fostered by a count. When he discovers that he is a foundling and goes off to look for his parents, he defeats an enemy for his unrecognized grandfather, and so meets his mother. They are immediately attracted to one another, but before there is any question of love or marriage she asks him who he is, and recognizes him by means of the cloth with which she had exposed him, and also by his resemblance to his rapist father. Richars then goes off to find his father.
He wins a tournament and excuses all his defeated opponents from paying a ransom on condition that they recount the most amazing thing that ever happened to them. His father tells of the rape, and this leads to a recognition scene. Here the potential incest and parricide seem to be deliberately downplayed: there is no danger of incest between Richars and his mother because they discover their relationship so quickly, and the recognition scene with the father is part of a larger episode in which Richars defeats many knights and displays heroic generosity to them all.57 There is a similar deflecting of the danger of incest and parricide in Parise la Duchesse, wherethe mother recognizes her long-lost son at a very early stage, and the son knows his father’s identity while fighting him.58
The fashion for this type of near-miss mother–son incest, and for a happy ending with a safely exogamous bride provided for the hero, also produced a startling rewriting of the Gregorius in the Spanish version published by Timoneda in his Patrañuelo of 1576.59 Here the hero does not consummate his incestuous marriage with his mother, but discovers the truth just in time; she urges him to keep the scandal secret, and on her advice he marries the widow of the faithful steward who had advised on the problems surrounding his birth. The story ends there, shorn of its religious dimension and of its propaganda for contrition and penance. In Timoneda’s hands it is the tale not of a saint but of a knight, and therefore ends with secular prosperity in the form of a successful and legitimate marriage, rather than retreat from the world and spiritual reward.
We have seen three very different forms of medieval variation on the Oedipus theme. It could be used to blacken further an already accepted villain, as in the Judas story; here the prophecy of disaster comes true, and there can be no rehabilitation for the protagonist, even though his parricide and incest are not deliberate, since he is destined to betray Christ. It could be adapted to show the power of contrition and penance, and the miraculous workings of divine grace, as in the stories of Gregorius, Albanus, and their analogues; when a prophecy is included here, it comes true but does not preclude the repentance and absolution of the protagonist.
These stories are comedies in the Christian sense, for although the protagonists abandon the world and may even be martyred, like Albanus, they achieve spiritual success; the incest may be seen as a ‘felix culpa’, a fortunate crime which leads to salvation.60 Finally (and this probably was a later development based on the popularityof the exemplary models), it could be used as a rite of passage in chivalric narratives where a noble foundling succeeds in avoiding both incest and parricide, and so proves his maturity and prowess while also discovering his identity and reuniting his long-separated parents. So far the stories under discussion have all been free-standing, unconnected to larger story-cycles. One other variation on the Oedipus plot should be noted here, a version which is neither explicitly exemplary nor titillating in the manner of the romances discussed above.
The popularity of the linked motifs of exposure, parricide, and incest is shown by their insertion into some versions of the Arthurian legend. In the early versions of the legend, as recounted by Geoffrey of Monmouth and his followers, Mordred is Arthur’s nephew, who betrays the king’s trust by usurping his queen and his throne. But in the thirteenth century (if not before) a more elaborate story developed: Mordred is the result of incest between Arthur and his unrecognized half-sister Morgause.61 His story thus becomes an unusual variation on the stories of Judas and Gregorius, complicated by the particular constraints imposed by the traditional Arthurian frame.62
Unwitting sibling incest plus a prophecy of disaster lead to the exposure of a child who grows up to attempt quite deliberately to marry his stepmother, and to succeed in quite deliberately killing his father (who simultaneously kills him). Here the tragic ending leaves no room for contrition, confession, penance, or absolution. Mordred is the Judas at the Round Table who betrays his lord (and his father). There is a fatalism about his story which is reminiscent of both Judas and Oedipus; the prophecy of disaster is ineluctable, the monstrous sin cannot be absolved. Neither Mordred’s attempted incest nor his successful parricide brings about the sort of peripeteia that we have seen in other medieval stories of mother–son incest, whether consummated or averted. In the Arthurian legend parricide means the end of Arthur, and thus the end of the whole story.
MOTHERS IN EXEMPLA : DELIBERATE INCEST
It is a striking aspect of all the stories of mother–son incest discussed so far that the focus has been on the son rather than the mother. In the exemplary stories of Gregorius and Albanus it is the mother who commits incest twice over; we are given someinsight into her feelings, especially in Hartmann’s Gregorius, but it is the contrition and penance of the son which are crucial, and it is he who achieves spiritual greatness at the end. Gregorius’ mother, though pious, has no formal status in the Church, and Albanus’ mother dies unabsolved. In each case the son is put in a situation towards the end of the story which demonstrates not only his spiritual growth, but also his superiority to his mother and his control over her: Gregorius as Pope absolves his penitent mother and puts her in a convent; Albanus kills his bad mother when she relapses into her old sin, a sin which he has put firmly behind him.
In the romances of separated families too, the mother disappears from the story while the son (or the father in Sir Eglamour) performs deeds of chivalric prowess. Once she has exposed her illegitimate son, she has no further role to play except to be married, first to her unrecognized son and then to her longlost lover. She has nothing to repent, and nothing to achieve. I do not know any romances or extended narratives involving mother–son incest, potential or actual, which focus on the mother, or in which the mother initiates the incest.63 But women do have acentral role in a very popular group of short exempla in which a mother knowingly commits incest with her adolescent son, a theme which continued to be popular into the Renaissance, and which in some cases offers interesting parallels with the Gregorius/Albanus double incest plot.
In Tubach’s Index Exemplorum the majority of the entries under incest concern mothers and sons: a mother falsely accuses her son of incest because he has rejected her advances, and is subsequently struck dead by a thunderbolt; a mother is denounced by the devil for incest with her son and infanticide, but is saved by the Virgin’s intercession; a mother dies of fright when she realizes that she is about to commit incest with her son, who has come home incognito to test her and see if women really are insatiably lustful.64
These stories usually concern bourgeois women rather than aristocrats, and they are nameless; the sons are also nameless, and play little part in the plots, which emphasize female lust and reluctance to confess (often the spiritual fate of the son remains unknown). The incest is almost always deliberate—or at least there is no uncertaintyabout identity. The point of the stories is still the value of contrition and confession, but unlike the protagonists of comparable male-centred stories, these women take a long time to acknowledge their sin and cast themselves on God’s mercy. Furthermore, they do not usually achieve any special spiritual status at the end; sometimes they die as soon as they have confessed, and the implication is that they are very lucky to have escaped eternal damnation.
One of the most popular of these exempla is the story of the mother who commits incest and sometimes infanticide too, but eventually confesses (Tubach, no. 2730). This type of exemplum seems to start in a very simple form; an early version, possibly the earliest, appears in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum (written about 1200), in the section on Contrition.65
A woman is overwhelmed by lust for her own son, gets pregnant by him, and bears a son. After consulting a priest she takes the baby to Rome and manages to see the Pope. He orders her to dress as she did to tempt her son; she does so, feeling that shame in this world is trivial compared with shame in the afterlife. The Pope is impressed and absolves her, but a cardinal complains that she should do more penance for such a sin. The Pope invites the devil to enter him if he has made a mistake, or to enter the cardinal if the judgement was just. The devil torments the cardinal, who never again criticizes God’s mercy. The novice to whom the stories are being recounted comments that divine grace is amazing, since fifteen years of penance would hardly seem enough in this case.
This version is slightly unusual in that the mother repents so quickly of her sin, but the main point is the standard one, the sincerity of her contrition which so impresses both the Pope and the devil. We are not told what happened to the son, who tends to disappear early on from this type of story, leaving hismother at centrestage. No mention is made here of her husband; in many versions of this story, the mother is a widow and is passionately attached to her adolescent son. One might compare this situation, which helps to explain her sin without exonerating it, with the popular narrative of the widowed father’s desire for his own daughter who resembles his dead wife.
The Gesta Romanorum contains a more elaborate version of the story of the lustful mother under the rubric ‘De Amore Inordinato’ (About Inappropriate Love).66
An emperor’s widowed daughter is so attached to her son that she sleeps in his bed until he is eighteen.67 The devil tempts the son to have intercourse with his mother. When she becomes pregnant, the son travels far away. The mother kills her newborn child by cutting its throat; drops of blood make four ineradicable redcircles on her hand, so that she has to cover it permanently with a glove. She is too ashamed to confess, but the Virgin appears to her confessor and tells him that the glove conceals the evidence of the lady’s secret sin. He persuades her to remove the glove, and finds four bloody circles on her hand: each contains four letters, four Cs in one, four Ds in the second, four Ms in the third, four Rs in the fourth. Around the circles he sees an inscription: ‘Casu Cecidisti Carne Cecata, Demoni Dedisti Dona Donata, Monstrat Manifeste Manus Maculata, Recedit Rubigo Regina Rogata’ (You have fallen by misfortune, blinded by the flesh; you have given the gifts you were given to the devil; the stain on your hand shows it clearly; the red mark goes away when the Queen (of Heaven) is invoked). The lady confesses, is absolved, and dies a few days later.
Rank explains this story as the son’s wish fantasy, but here again he disappears early on from the story, which focuses on his mother’s conscience.68 The moralization of the Gesta Romanorum version explains that the incestuous emperor is Christ, who marries His own daughter, human nature, when He becomes a man. The infanticide represents the soul destroyed by sin and deprived of eternal life. The blood on the lady’s hands recalls the recurrent biblical saying ‘my life is always in my hands’ (see for instance Job 13: 14 and Psalm 119: 109). An alternative moralization explains that the lady is human nature, and conceives through lust when the apple of original sin has been eaten. The first bloody circle is Cogitatio (Resolution) preceding the sin, the second is Delectatio (Delight), the third Consensus (Consent), the fourth Actus Peccati (the Sinful Act). Adam was marked with the same circles when he sinned, says the author, and so are all the rest of us. Here incest is explicitly equated with original sin (though, paradoxically, it also symbolizes the mystical marriage of Christ and mankind, as in the moralization of Gregorius).
At one level the incest is even more horrifying here than in the Gregorius and Albanus stories, since it is not unwitting in either case: father and daughter, mother and son are all well aware of their relationships. Infanticide was a practical remedy much employed in contemporary society; it is a frequent theme in exempla which involve incest.69 In the hagiographic romances, of course, the plot requires that the child of the first incest be exposed but survive to commit incest himself before he repents and is absolved; exposure was also a common practice in the Middle Ages.70 The choice of infanticide rather than exposure in the exempla serves to accumulate sins and thus to emphasize the sinner’s need for contrition and the miraculous salvation of the ending; the infanticide motif also shows how one sin breeds another, as lust leads to violence. Infanticide also increases the focus on the guilt and confession of the mother; the feelings and fate of the son are seldom discussed. The suspense of the story lies in the threat of eternal damnation for the protagonist; writers of exempla felt no need to tie up all the loose ends and dispose of all the characters in the manner of romance writers.
This exemplum was presumably intended to show that although women are notoriously weak and sinful and above all lustful, even they can repent and be saved, so it needed to be accessible to a less learned audience. It survives in various vernacular versions, especially in French. ‘La Bourjosse de Romme’ elaborates plausibly on the circumstances of the initial incest, and also includes infanticide.71
A rich bourgeois on his deathbed urges his wife to use his money for charity, and to cherish their infant son. She agrees, and always sleeps in the same bed as the boy. When he grows up, he realizes the danger of this practice and asks for a separate bed, to avoidthe sin of lechery. His mother refuses, accusing him of wanting torun off to loose women. The devil tempts the boy and he gets his mother pregnant. She dares not confess, strangles her baby, and continues to dispense charity and to enjoy an excellent reputation.
The devil disguised as a pious doctor denounces her to the emperor (in one version a series of mysterious murders is attributed to her). She is to be burned at the stake, but the Virgin arranges that the Pope himself should hear her confession secretly. The devil is forced to withdraw his accusation, and she becomes a nun devoted to the Virgin.
Here too the emphasis is on confession: no penance is required. The son’s responsibility is minimalized; his mother persists in sleeping with him in spite of his protests, and so he gives in to the devil’s tempting. No more is heard of him once his mother is pregnant; apparently it is of no interest whether contrition makes him confess or not. This story appears in many collections of miracles of the Virgin, whose role seems particularly appropriate; she is the perfect foil for the incestuous mother, since she herself conceived without sin, and is quite properly the spiritual Bride of her own Son, as well as His Mother.72
In a more complex version of this story, the ‘Dit du Buef’, the writer introduces the story as an example for sinners, and as illustrating a blow we can deal to the devil through confession, but in fact the story is largely about penance.73
A widow cherishes her son, who greatly resembles his dead father. She sleeps in his bed, and they have a long affair. When she gets pregnant the devil rejoices, but we are assured that God will save the sinners because of their penitence. The son confesses to the local priest, who sends him to the Pope for absolution. The Pope imposes no penance, but employs the youth as a chamberlain, to keep him from relapsing into sin. The devil tries to persuade the mother to kill the baby she is carrying, but the Virgin helps her at the birth. She confesses to the priest, who tells her to go to Rome, but she does not. Her daughter grows up unaware of her parentage. When she is 12, the Virgin advises her to ask her mother about her father. The mother reveals the secret, and the priest advises the daughter to go to the Pope at Rome. At last the two set off. At Rome the son identifies himself as mother and daughter are confessing.
The Pope decrees that all three are to be sewn into cowhides which leave only their hands, feet, and heads free; they are to wander through the world separately for seven years, and may not talk if they chance to meet. At the end of this time they are to return to Rome. After seven years they all arrive on the same night at a village near Rome, and are given lodging in a barn. A series of miracles occurs: an empty pot is found to be full of food for the strangers, and the host’s two children, one blind, the other crippled, are cured overnight. A great light shines from the barn: each of the penitents has prayed to God to be taken to heaven that night, and angels come to fetch them. Next morning the Pope is summoned, and is informed by an angel of what has happened. The bodies are too heavy to be moved; each holds a letter with a name and a prayer to the Virgin. The Pope founds a monastery on the spot and buries them in it. Miraculous cures continue to occur there.
Here for once the product of incest is a daughter, who survives to play a crucial part in the story. The shock and horror of Gregorius and Albanus when they discover the identity of their wives is replaced here by the horror of the 12-year-old girl on discovering the identity of her father. We might have expected the son to marry his unrecognized sister-daughter when she arrives in Rome, but the author spares us such double incest (though it does appear in some Renaissance versions which are discussed below). It is the penance that interests him, and here it is a folk variant of the penance of Albanus and his parents; the three sinners must separate and wander the world for a number of years. But what is the significance ofthe cowhides they wear?
The woman who gives them lodging is horrified by their appearance, and thinks that they cannot be Christians: perhaps the implication is that by giving in to animal lust in defiance of social convention and religious prohibition, they have reduced themselves to the level of animals and must be treatedas such.74 Régnier-Bohler suggests that the hides suppress identity and make sexual activity impossible, as a way of redressing the confusion of identities caused by the incest; she argues that this obliteration of identity is a necessary prelude to their spiritual rebirth as absolved Christians at the end.75 There may be a connection here with the tale of Peau d’Âne, where the animal skin helps the heroine to evade seduction. Possibly there is also an echo of the hair shirts worn as part of penance, or even without penance by devout Christians.76
Their penance seems to be a combination of the pilgrimage often prescribed as a punishment for incest in the early penitentials, and the social marginalization or scapegoating associated with the shame of breaking a taboo. The ‘Dit du Buef’ resembles the story of Albanus in that the family separates to do penanceby wandering in the world, and that they all die at the end of the penance (though in very different circumstances). Again the emphasis is on the value of contrition and, in this case, rigorous penance as prescribed by an ecclesiastical authority. But here the whole family is absolved; the focus is not on the son alone as in the pious romances, nor on the mother as in analogous exempla. One might argue that in both cases a family is destroyed by incest, but here the moral seems to be that the family that repents sincerely together also goes to heaven together. The absolved sinners are only named at the very end (the son’s name is missing in the manuscript); the story does not seem to be linked to an existing saint’s cult, but rather to be purely exemplary.
In the ‘Bourjosse de Romme’ and the ‘Dit du Buef’, as in ‘De Amore Inordinato’, there is no question of unwitting incest; the transgression seems to be largely attributable to obsessive maternal love (and perhaps the frustrations of widowhood).77 The son in these exempla bears little responsibility; he simply gives in to temptation when his mother provides the opportunity. The writers often attribute the incest to the influence of the devil; clearly the son is not actually raped, but very little is said about his feelings (there is no profound passion as in the sibling incest in Gregorius). As Cazauran shows, variants on this theme of the knowingly incestuous mother and her eventual repentance were very popular throughout the later Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance. I want to discuss three Renaissance versions all written about 1540–50 because, although strictly speaking they are outside the period of this study, they include some important plot twists which seem to be borrowed from the Gregorius/Albanus pattern of double incest. This variant appears in Bandello’s influential collection of novelle, in Luther’s commentary on Genesis, and in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron.78 Here is the basic plot; I will comment on the variations in each of the three stories in turn.
A maidservant complains to her mistress, a noble widow, that the son of the house is propositioning her. The mother hides in his bed to verify the story, and succumbs to his lust without revealing her identity. She conceives that night; overcome by guilt and shame, she finds excuses to send away both the maid and her son. The daughter who is subsequently born is reared in another house. She grows up to be very beautiful; her father/brother falls in love with her and marries her—neither knows their true relationship. The mother is horrified. The young couple remain married in blissful ignorance.
Here we have double incest comparable to that in the Gregorius. The mother knows who her son is when she sleeps with him, but the second incest is entirely unwitting on both sides. The main innovation here, however, is that the lady’s children never discover the truth, and are allowed to remain married. Only the mother suffersthe physical and emotional consequences of her lapse into sin, a lapse which is emphasized by the unexpectedly determined virtuousnessof the maid at the beginning.
In Bandello’s version, the mother is presented as somewhat worldly. The narrator gives several possible explanations for her incest: she may have secretly desired her son, or just wanted to embarrass him, or there may have been some other reason. She is still relatively young, and responds enthusiastically to his embrace; he on the other hand is a virgin, and cannot distinguish a maiden from an experienced woman. A cousin raises the baby at first, but then the mother takes her in, apparently as an act of charity, before sending her off to the court of Navarre. When the mother hears that her son has married his sister/daughter, she becomes mortally ill, confesses to the bishop, and dies. This ending recalls the earlier exempla in which the mother resists confession for many years, and then dies as soon as she has confessed. The bishop and the Queen of Navarre decide that the newly-weds must never know the truth, so the cover-up is both theologically and socially sanctioned.
Luther tells his version as part of his commentary on Genesis 36: 14 (written between 1535 and 1545), which mentions Esau’s wife Oholibamah: according to one Jewish tradition shewas the daughter of Anah who was born of incest between Zibeon and his stepmother, but according to another she herself committed incest with her father-in-law Anah. Luther comments that there is no historical record of the incest of Anah and Oholibamah, and so it should remain hidden, like the secrets of the confessional. Although Luther was opposed to the corrupt system of indulgences, he saw psychological value in confession as a means of consolation for sinners,and as an example tells this story of double incest which he says was recounted in the confessional to a colleague of his at Erfurt. In his version the child of the first incest is raised incognita in her mother’s house, and it is there that the son falls in love with her; because of their mother’s opposition the young lovers marry secretly. The mother is so desperate that she contemplates suicide, but eventually confesses to a priest. He consults expert theologians, who rule that since the couple are ignorant of their relationship and are very happily married, they should not be separated or told the truth; the mother is absolved. Luther approves this judgement, and offers the story as a reminder to keen young priests that good pastors‘do not burden or involve consciences but liberate, encourage, and heal the consciences which the devil has driven mad and enmeshed in his snares’ (300).
Marguerite de Navarre’s version in the Heptaméron offers further variations, and an intriguing and unexpected moral. Here the mother is a particularly pious young widow who rejects all worldliness. As soon as the incest is committed she feels deep remorse, but her pride is such that she thinks she can resist future sin without help from God (the narrator stresses this point). She sends her son away to the wars; when he wants to return, she forbids him until he can bring a well-born wife whom he loves deeply, whether or not she is rich. This stipulation seems to function like the gloves in Sir Degaré, virtually guaranteeing that he will eventually meet and fall in love with his daughter/sister. The girl is sent to the court of Navarre, where she has many admirers, but because she is poor no one wants to marry her. Her father/brother arrives one day and falls in love with her; he marries her and writes to his mother that he has fulfilled her condition. The mother realizes the truth and is in despair, but confesses to the Legate at Avignon. He consults theologians, who advise that the couple must be told nothing but the lady must do penance secretly for the rest of her life.
This story is told by aman,Hircan, and occurs in the series of tales ‘Des dames qui en leur amytié n’ont cerché nulle fin que l’honnesteté, et de l’hypocrisye et mechanceté des religieux’ (Of ladieswho in love have sought no goal but goodness, and of the hypocrisy and wickedness of monks). The storyteller specifically addresses the ladies in his audience when he comments at the end of his tale: ‘Voylà, mes dames, comme il en prent à celles qui cuydent par leurs forces et vertuvaincre amour et nature avecq toutes les puissances que Dieu y a mises’ (233: There, Ladies, that is what becomes of those women who presume by their own strength and virtue to overcome love and nature and all the powers that God has placed therein). A lady, Longarine, remarks that the moral is that no woman should share a bed with a male relative of any kind, ‘car le feu auprès des estouppes n’est point seur’ (234: for it is not safe to set a naked flame near tinder). Ennasuite comments cattily that the lady must have been convinced by the Franciscans that she was incapable of sin, and Longarine explains that the Franciscans deliberately subject themselves to sexual temptation.
The general conclusion seems to be that the human inclination to carnality is pandemic, and should never be underestimated. Although the lady does confess, there is no happy ending for her; shemust do penance and livewith her awful secret for the rest of her life, while her children live happily in their transgressive marriage. In a way, this is the most misogynistic of all the versions of the theme of the mother who knowingly sleeps with her son, though here it is her pride rather than her lust that is attacked. By comparison, the medieval versions seem much more sympathetic to the incestuous mother. And in all these stories the son seems to get away scot-free, whether or not he marries his sister.79
The conclusion of this exemplum seems far removed from the twelfth-century view that the infant Gregorius is tainted at birth by his parents’ incest, and that once he has himself committed incest,albeit unwittingly, he is no longer fit for human society till he has paid for his sin with many years of extreme suffering. There was certainly a substantial change in thinking about incest in the early modern period, partly as a result of the Reformation.80 The most common and also the most serious form of incest problem in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays seems to be falling in love with one’s sister.
The most extreme example is Ford’s ’T is Pity She’s a Whore (1633), where the male protagonist feels no shame in defying social convention and ecclesiastical advice, and is prepared to die rather than deny his love. At the end of his valuable article on incest in folksongs, Brewster concludes that songs of brother–sister incest outnumber all others, and that songs of a mother’s desire for her son are rare.81
The situation in medieval literature appears to be just the opposite, though of course many of the longer mother–son incest stories are about unwitting incest; it is mostly in the brief exempla that mothers knowingly sleep with their sons.82 Didactic tales that begin with sibling or father–daughter incest often continue with mother–son incest (for instance Gregorius). In those that begin with mother–son incest, there is usually no such sequel (for instance, the ‘Bourjosse de Romme’ and the ‘Dit du Buef’); mother–son incest is a sufficient sin for the subsequent moral about confession and penance. For the Middle Ages, the most serious form of incest, deliberate or not, was incest between son and
mother.
NOTES
1 Octavius, ch. 31 (my translation, improved by Keith Bradley). In Chs. 1 and 2 I quote responses of other early Christian apologists to similar charges. For more patristic comments on the practice of exposure and the risk of incest, see Boswell, Kindness of Strangers, 138–79.
2 The father–daughter version is much rarer in medieval literature than the mother–son version; see my comments in the next chapter. Potentially incestuous encounters in brothels between fathers and daughters or siblings are common in classical New Comedy, but very rare in medieval texts.
3 For analogues of the Oedipus story from all over the world see Edmunds and Dundes (eds.), Oedipus Casebook; Johnson and Price-Williams, Oedipus Ubiquitous. On recognition scenes see Aristotle, who lists them in five categories of ascending effectiveness (Poetics, ch. 16 (1454b–1455a) ); and also Cave’s magisterial study, Recognitions, though it includes little comment on medieval texts. Frye discusses identity as a particularly characteristic and crucial theme for romance in Secular Scripture, esp. ch. 4, ‘The Bottomless Dream: Themes of Descent’, where he considers descent into poverty or despair or madness in relation to the concealment or revelation of descent in the genealogical sense.
4 Payen, Le Motif, 519 ff., and see also his chapter on Contritionism, 54–75; Archibald, ‘Incest’; Dorn, Der Sündige Heilige.
5 As I noted in the previous chapter, Sophocles’ ending in Oedipus at Colonus, where Oedipus becomes a saint-like figure whose grave will benefit the land where he dies, would not have been widely known in the Middle Ages.
6 Propp notes that the prophecy is ‘organically linked with the entire plot’ in Sophocles, but not in medieval adaptations of the story (‘Oedipus’, 83).
7 Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, 184–6. For other texts and discussion of the development of the legend see La Leggenda, ed. d’Ancona; Constans, La Légende, 95–103; Rand, ‘Medieval Lives’; Baum, ‘Medieval Legend’; Lehmann, ‘Judas Iscariot’; Reider, ‘Medieval Oedipal Legends’; Edmunds, ‘Oedipus in the Middle Ages’, esp. 149 ff.; Axton, ‘Interpretations’; Ohly, Damned, 1–102.
8 Kermode, Genesis of Secrecy, 91, quoted by Axton, ‘Interpretations’, 179.
9 Baum, ‘Medieval Legend’, 615; Axton, ‘Interpretations’, 182–3. It is hard to assess the possible oral circulation of the Oedipus story, or of analogues; it seems probable that it was popular in oral form in western Europe just as it was in the rest of the world.
10 It is striking that when his mother discovers Judas’ identity, her immediate reaction is to curse the dream which caused her first husband to fear his unborn son and to expose him at birth; rather than simply being horrified at their sin, she makes the crucial connection between exposure and incest, as if it exonerated them, at least in part.
11 Edmunds, ‘Oedipus in the Middle Ages’, 149.
12 The quotation is taken from the Type A version printed by Baum, ‘Medieval Legend’, 490. This version does show some sympathy for Judas, according to Rand, ‘Medieval Lives’, 314, and Baum, ‘Medieval Legend’, 491.
13 Axton, ‘Interpretations’, 187; Brewer, Symbolic Stories, 61–2.
14 The brutal father of Beatrice Cenci (d. 1599) is said to have tried to persuade her to accept his incestuous advances by arguing that the offspring of incestuous liaisons between fathers and daughters were all saints.
15 Rank, Incest Theme, 271.
16 Ohly, Damned, 5.
17 Payen, Le Motif, 54 ff. I know no saint’s life from earlier centuries in which the saint-to-be commits incest, with the possible exception of St Metro.
18 I have used Paul’s edition of Hartmann’s text ; for the Old French texts see La Vie du Pape Grégoire, ed. Sol. On the ‘holy sinner’ theme see Dorn, Der Sündige Heilige, esp. 86–9; and Ohly, Damned, esp. 1–61.
19 Hartmann also produced a version of Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian romance Yvain, so he clearly had access to a range of French literature, both religious and chivalric; and he wrote another didactic poem, Der Arme Heinrich, the story of a man smitten by leprosy and saved by grace.
20 As Legros points out, Gregorius as Pope is the spiritual father of all Christians, and is also married to the Church, in spiritual terms (‘Parenté naturelle’, 529). One might add that as a nun, his mother is the bride of Christ.
21 Tobin, ‘Fallen Man’, 92; he reads the poem as the story of fallen man redeemed by divine grace, and stresses the presence of the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Prologue.
22 Mancinelli, ‘Der guote sündaere’.
23 Ohly notes that there is a very ancient tradition of Adam and Eve standing on stones in the Jordan as penance for the Fall, and that in the 10th-cent. Navigatio Sancti Brendani the saint meets Judas, who is allowed out of hell at intervals to stand on a rock in the middle of the ocean. These stories may have been models for Gregorius’ penance; on the other hand, the Gregorius story may have influenced a later German version of St Brendan’s voyage in which he meets a man standing on a rock in the sea as penance for incest with his sister (Damned, 49–56).
24 Arnold von Lübeck, Gesta Gregorii, ed. Schilling. Arnold was commissioned to translate Hartmann’s poem by William; he seems not to have known any Latin version of the story, or indeed any other version at all. He remarks in his introduction on its
value for Christian teaching; this suggests that it had only circulated orally before the 12th cent.
25 He is, however, more explicit than Hartmann about the status of incest as a sin: in an internal debate before the sibling incest, the sister’s Reason reminds her that ‘incestus superat omne scelus’ (I. 203: incest is the worst of crimes). The poor girl sums up her situation at I. 337 ff.: she feels guilty before God and ashamed before men.
26 King, ‘Mother’s Guilt’, 93.
27 Ruh, Höfische Epik, 109, quoted by Mertens, Gregorius Eremita, 67.
28 Christoph, ‘Guilt, Shame’; for the quotation from Nobel see 212. There may also be some sense of pollution; Mary Douglas comments that ‘pollution rules do not correspond closely to moral rules’ (Purity, 130).
29 See Guerreau-Jalabert, ‘Inceste et sainteté’, and Gaunt, Gender and Genre, 198–212. Gaunt argues that ‘the shadow of incest underscores the portrayal of chivalric marriage in romance and once again shows how hagiography contests the values of other vernacular genres’ (201). He also thinks that Gregorius’ grandfather is ultimately to blame for everything because he failed to marry off his daughter before his own death, and so left her vulnerable to her brother’s lust; a similar argument is made by Legros, ‘Parenté naturelle’, 516.
30 Abelard uses the example of sleeping with an unrecognized sister to show that intention is crucial to sin: see Ethics, ed. and trans. Luscombe, 26–7. See also Herlem-Prey, ‘Schuld oder Nichtschuld’.
31 Ohly comments (Damned, 11): ‘The shorter route to grace via absolution is theologically irreproachable, but narratologically weak: the story gives God time to elect those whose penance is not imposed, but chosen freely.’
32 Gaunt, Gender and Genre, 204.
33 Legros, ‘Parenté naturelle’, 545; see also 525, and my argument in ‘Gold in the Dungheap’. 34 See Gaunt, Gender and Genre, 180–211
35 In the French version she regrets endangering her brother’s soul; this does not seem to worry Hartmann.
36 This legend is preserved in a 17th-cent. folktale collection, but it derives from much earlier legends; see Rank, Incest Theme, 279 ff., and Dorn, Der Sündige Heilige, 88.
37 Baum, ‘Medieval Legend’, 597–8.
38 Baum, ‘Medieval Legend’, 598. I cite the text edited by Morvay as Version A in Die Albanuslegende, 12–39. See also Constans, La Légende, 114–15; Rank, Incest Theme, 290–4; and Dorn, Der Sündige Heilige, 84–6.
39 Rank, Incest Theme, 290.
40 Edmunds, ‘Oedipus in the Middle Ages’, 153.
41 Rank points out the parallels between the stories of Albanus and Julian, whom he calls ‘the Catholic Oedipus’ (Incest Theme, 392 ff.). Julian is warned in a prophecy that he will kill his parents; he travels far away and marries. His parents search for him and arrive at his house by chance when he is out; his wife realizes who they are, entertains them hospitably, and puts them to sleep in Julian’s own bed. When he comes home and
sees two figures in his bed, he assumes that his wife has a lover and kills them both, only to discover that they were his devoted parents. He and his wife do penance, and die absolved. Rank suggests that a motive of sexual jealousy, perhaps even incest, has disappeared here. Certainly the pattern of prophecy, murder, penance, and sanctification suggests the Holy Sinner genre to which the stories of Gregorius and Albanus belong, and of which Judas is an antitype; see also Dorn, Der Sündige Heilige, 90–102.
42 See the editions of d’Ancona and Benucci, La Leggenda, and also Constans, La Légende, 118–20, and Rank, Incest Theme, 296.
43 See Constans, La Légende, 120–1; Rank, Incest Theme, 296–7; and Taylor, ‘Riddles’, 26–7.
44 Gesta Romanorum, ch. 170, ed. Dick, 148–59 (Latin); Early English Versions, ed. Herrtage, 250–63.
45 Gesta Romanorum, ch. 81, ed. Oesterley, 399–409.
46 This was an important issue in medieval Europe; see Boswell’s discussion of foundlings and baptism in Kindness of Strangers, 322–5 and 374–5.
47 It may seem surprising that Gregorius never makes a formal confession to a priest. Though in the 12th cent. increasing importance was attributed to contrition, confession, and penance by theologians, it was not usual to confess regularly and frequently until the practice of annual confession was instituted by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Fordiscussion of the literary impact of this change see Baldwin, ‘From the Ordeal’.
48 The notion of imitatio Christi in the story of Gregorius is discussed by Mertens, Gregorius Eremita, 68–9.
49 Gesta Romanorum, ch. 244, ed. Oesterley, 641–6; it has no rubric and the hero has no name, though it is clearly the story of Albanus.
50 See for instance Johnson and Price-Williams, Oedipus Ubiquitous. Since the earliest extant versions of the Gregorius are in French and German, it may well be that this and similar stories were circulating orally throughout the earlier Middle Ages, and that it was only in the 12th cent. that they were taken up by writers keen to warn against the dangers of incest and to encourage the practice of contrition and penance.
51 For the story of Apollo see Le Roman de Tristan, ed. Curtis, i. 49–122. It is summarized by Löseth, Le Roman en prose de Tristan, 4–15; and by Baumgartner, Le ‘Tristan’, 1–3. See also Grisward, ‘Un schème narratif’; Traxler, ‘Observations’;
Mickel, ‘Tristan’s Ancestry’; and Gracia, ‘La Prehistoria’
52 I cite the edition of Richardson.
53 See Potter, Sohrab and Rustum.
54 I cite Schleich’s edition as corrected by Jacobs, The Later Versions, 12–37. Unfortunately the ending of the poem is missing, though a crude version exists in 16thcent. printed versions, and in an inferior 15th-cent. manuscript; see the comments of Jacobs.
55 Simpson, ‘Violence, Narrative’. See also Kay’s interesting discussion of father–son relations in epic and in romance in her chapter on patriarchy in The Chansons de geste, 79–115.
56 Richars li Biaus, ed. Holden; it may share a source with Sir Degaré. See also Bouché, ‘De “l’enfant trouvé’’ ’.
57 There is potential incest early on, when Richars is horrified at the suggestion that he marry the woman he thinks of as his sister; this is how he discovers that he is a foundling. The final recognition through story-telling is a secular equivalent of the confessions which trigger recognitions in other incest stories, such as Gregorius and the Flight from the Incestuous Father narratives to be discussed in the next chapter. It also occurs in classical New Comedy: see Trenkner, Greek Novella, 91. A variant of this motif appears in Apollonius of Tyre in the hero’s reunions with both daughter and wife.
58 I cite the edition of Plouzeau.
59 Timoneda, Patrañuelo, ch. 5, ed. Romera Castillo, 117–22. The editor comments on the last page that it is impossible to tell whether the new ending is the author’s own invention; no direct source is known.
60 ‘Felix culpa’ was the phrase used by St Ambrose and many later medieval writers to describe the Fall of Man, an apparent disaster which led to the Incarnation and therefore to the salvation of mankind. Rocher discusses it in relation to Gregorius in ‘Das Motiv’.
61 For a full account for the development of the story of Mordred.
62 Arthur must be the hero, and Mordred the villain; Morgause disappears from the story early on, reappearing only to come to a bad end when her sons murder first her andthen her young lover.
63 Semiramis’ affair with her son appears in some collections of exempla, but there is no extended medieval account of it. In the stories of separated families which focus on the heroine as calumniated wife (the so-called Constance group), the heroine’s
young son usually stays with her; thus there is no danger of inadvertent incest.
64 Tubach, Index Exemplorum, nos. 2730, 2733–8, 4667. I use Tubach’s numbering to refer to the exempla, but it should be noted that his survey is not complete; for additional material, see Berlioz and Polo de Beaulieu, Les Exempla médiévaux. On misogyny in the exempla see Karras, ‘Gendered Sin’; on misogyny in confessional literature see Murray,‘Gendered Souls’.
65 Dialogue on Miracles; 2. 11, trans. Scott and Swinton Bland, i. 84–5. On the history of this theme see Cazauran, ‘La Trentième Nouvelle’, an essay to which I am much indebted.
66 Gesta Romanorum, ch. 13, ed. Oesterley, 291–4; ‘inordinato’ might also be translated as ‘excessive’ or ‘irregular’. The story appears in many other collections: seeTubach, Index Exemplorum, no. 2730.
67 The text does not actually say that this is her son by her own father the emperor, but it is assumed in the moralization. I am indebted to students in my 1996 Medieval Studies 210 class at the University of Victoria for pointing this out to me.
68 Rank, Incest Theme, 276.
69 See Gravdal, ‘Confessing Incests’.
70 See Boswell, Kindness of Strangers.
71 Jehan de Saint-Quentin, Dits en quatrains, ed. Munk Olsen, 39–46; also ed. Jubinal in Nouveau recueil, i. 79–87. See Payen, Le Motif, 22–4, and Régnier-Bohler, ‘L’Inceste'.
72 The relationship of the Virgin with God the Father and God the Son, which is often represented by medieval writers as a sort of ‘holy incest’.
73 Jehan de Saint-Quentin, Dits en quatrains, 216–45; Nouveau recueil, i. 42–72. See Régnier-Bohler, ‘L’Inceste’, passim.
74 In the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion male siblings are transformed into animals and condemned to mate with each other as a punishment for raping a maiden; see Welsh, ‘Doubling and Incest’, and my comments in Ch. 5.
75 Régnier-Bohler, ‘L’Inceste’, 291.
76 See the comments of Kleist, Die erzählende französische Dit-Literaturen, 56 ff.
77 This kind of incest is undoubtedly present in our own society, but is not widely publicized or discussed.
78 Bandello, Le Novelle, 2.35, ed. Brognoligo, iii. 243–7; Luther, Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 31–37, trans. Paul, 291–300; Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron, ch. 30, ed.François, 229–33, trans. Chilton, 317–23. See also the comments of Cazauran, ‘La Trentième Nouvelle’, passim.
79 The only example I know of mother–son incest where the focus is on the son and his confession is a post-medieval ballad which probably had medieval antecedents, ‘Brown Robyn’s Confession’: see English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 57, ed. Child, ii. 13–16. Here Robyn confesses during a storm at sea that he has had two children by his mother and five by his sister, and so his men throw him overboard; but because he has confessed, the Virgin gives him the choice of returning to his ship or going to heaven, and he chooses heaven.
80 See McCabe, Incest, Drama, and Boehrer, Monarchy and Incest.
81 Brewster, Incest Theme, 25; I comment further on his conclusion in Ch. 5.
82 There is an example of deliberate (and multiple) mother–son incest in the legendary history of Britain, according to a narrative found in both Latin and Anglo-Norman and often attached to French prose Bruts, and sometimes to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia: see Des Granz Geanz, ed. Brereton, trans. Régnier-Bohler in Le Coeur mangé, 281–92, and for discussion and recent bibliography, Lesley Johnson, ‘Return to Albion’, in Arthurian Literature, 13 (1995), 19–40. The thirty (or fifty) daughters of a Greek king are set adrift after murdering their husbands. They come to an uninhabited island which they name Albion after the eldest, Albina. Sexually frustrated, they sleep first with incubi, and then with the giant sons produced by this intercourse. When Brutus and the Trojans arrive, they kill all the giants except Gogmagog, who tells the story of his origins. This strange episode may be a sort of parody of Gen. 6: 1–5, where the sons of God sleep with the daughters of men and beget a race who behave so badly that God devises the Flood.
By Elizabeth Archibald in "Incest and the Medieval Imagination", Clarendon Press, Oxford, USA, 2001, excerpts pp. 104-144. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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