Copyright 1997 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia. All rights reserved.

New Literary History 28.2 (1997) 261-289

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Regimes of the Visual in Premodern England: Gaze, Body, and Chaucer's Clerk's Tale Sarah Stanbury Figures

Chaucer's Clerk's Tale tells a story of visual investigation. Before his decision to marry Griselda, Walter, we hear, has often "sette his ye" on her--though not, the narrator carefully 1 notes, with "wantoun lookyng" but in "sad wyse." Later, after listening to Griselda's response to his ominous warning that the people are uneasy about their son's peasant blood, he averts his gaze in wonder, a gesture that evokes, proleptically, his visual scrutiny of her during the speech he has just heard: no doubt he has been studying her face for any signs of weakness. The looks Walter fixes on Griselda, acts of a private and studied investigation, are also mimicked throughout the text by the public, whose interrogative gaze follows her about, even to the threshold of her house as Walter enters with his marriage proposal. Indeed, Walter's private gaze seems to collude with a collective will to turn Griselda into a public spectacle, an intersection of wills and lines of sight that is most forcibly represented in the public acts of dressing and undressing her. After describing in quite detailed spatial terms how Walter goes out the door of Janicula's house, with Griselda behind him, to present her to the crowd--"this is my wyf . . . that stondeth heere"--the narrator goes on to say that Walter orders his women to undress her "right theere," as if the undressing and redressing (sic) of Griselda occurs in full view of a public gaze. And this public doesn't leave off with its first assessment, but continues to look and judge; accounts, both oblique and direct, of a collective gaze on Griselda occur with a marked structural symmetry in the final position of three successive stanzas: she is, the public thinks, "another creature" than Janicula's daughter; she is so virtuous and worthy that everyone loves her who looks at her (413); she is so famous her fame spreads so widely that people come from afar "upon hire to biholde" (420). The centering of Griselda as public spectacle, and as the focal point of multiple levels of collective and private scrutiny, evokes, of course, the paradigm that has been so frequently invoked and described in cultural theory of the last two decades--namely, the paradigm or 2 trope of a masculine gaze on a woman's body. A highly gendered construction of [End Page 261] visuality has been an important concern of texts that themselves have been foundational to postmodernism, cultural theory, and especially feminism: Freud's theories of castration and of the Oedipus complex; or Foucault's models of the visual disciplines of the patriarchal state. Both of these paradigms rely, albeit in different terms, on gendered visual metaphor, the gaze as male, to describe the recapitulative, appetitive construction of male identity and patriarchal hegemony: power relations in the modern state and in the modern male psyche are played out in a visual drama of desire and fear, authority enacted visually 3 through mastery of the complex nexus of terrors that women represent.

Individual and collective male gazes on Griselda would seem to exemplify this model with precision. Centering an interrogative private look and a public gaze, Griselda's body is both a place of resistance and a pice de resistance, "translated" materially through clothing and figuratively through visual assessment. As psychoanalytic studies of the Clerk's Tale have pointed out, the text seems to replay an oedipal narrative of gender formation, one in with 4 Otherness is invested in or inflicted on a feminine/maternal/sexual body. Walter's investigative quest attempts to vitiate the double jeopardy she poses as both primary object of his first love and as sign of his always imperiled masculinity. Arguing that the tale dramatizes parallels between religious, political, and marital forms of tyranny, Patricia Cramer claims that power relations at all levels of this tale replay a psychoanalytic narrative; Walter and Griselda are an "'ideal' [prototypical?] Oedipal couple whose sadomasochistic rituals of dominance and submission enact gender roles prescribed by patriarchal social structures which Freud recognized and propagated through his Oedipal models for mental health" (491). The familiar model that this argument invokes is resolutely binarist and heterosexist, defining Walter and Griselda through conventional tropes of gender: action and passivity, will and submission, exile and immanence, spirit and matter. Yet the very familiarity of the oedipal paradigm should strike a cautionary note, I think. For cultural schema, taking on material weight with the names they assume, not only expose or describe actions and allow us to identify them--much as the growing recognition and definitions of familial "abuse" or violence quite literally prompt the recognition of its practice-but also preclude alternative perceptions of the same scene. This process of exclusion occurs in part through the reifications of language, through the ways that naming plucks the "real" from the imaginary in a process of linguistic foreclosure that, like the trick of our eyes on a kaleidoscope, allows the unnamed and the unmarked to merge undifferentiated into 5 the background. The phrase "male gaze" has assumed much of its cultural freight through film theory, which has created a schema out of the gendered gaze through [End Page 262] intricately argued claims that Hollywood cinema has been organized along the sight-lines of a male spectator, and that cinema visually plays to male fantasies of desire and terror. As Laura Mulvey argues in her oft-cited essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Hollywood films portray "a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy" (VP 25). This audience, itself gendered as male through its metonymic emplacement as camera lens, gazing only as the camera gazes, acts out a male psychoanalytic fantasmatic. Building a recapitulative aesthetic on a story of castration, Mulvey argues, mainstream Hollywood cinema of the twentieth century controls and uses the female body as a sign for pleasure through a skillful manipulation of visual distance. Feminist film theory has been increasingly critiqued (and self-critiqued), however, for its articulation of a universalizing gaze and universalizing Woman as subject of representation 6 and for its assimilation of differences to a white, middle-class, heterosexual Hollywood 7 screen. For instance, in her essay "Tracking the Vampire" Sue-Ellen Case argues that psychoanalytic paradigms for the gaze as formulated in film theory, through a theoretical misprison, essentially imprison the texts they examine in a heterosexist representation that, she claims, belies the homoerotic desires that circulate within them. As she says, "the 8 hegemonic spread of the psychoanalytic does not allow for an imaginary of the queer." The hegemonic spread of the psychoanalytic may also foreclose an imaginary of historical difference, and especially of differences in the psychic and intersubjective life of persons in 9 premodern Europe. Indeed, few recent studies of spectatorship, either those that describe the gaze as a gesture and psychoanalytic marker of subjectivity or those that have explained visuality as a sociocultural index of regimes of economic and political power, have drawn on documents that antedate the Renaissance, and especially the eighteenth 10 century. The paradigm of the "male gaze," that is, emerges from a selected history that has given us brilliant accounts of the ways in which visuality in the West from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries intersects with psychic, cultural, and political structures, but that has scotomized the Middle Ages, unable or unwilling to address the medieval origins of later structures of visuality. Much of the attention to structures of visuality in the modern West derives, of course, from the very emphasis on visual experience and knowledge in modern cultural and intellectual life. Martin Jay, in his essay "Scopic Regimes of

Modernity," explains that he has chosen to situate his study in the "modern" era because 11 modernity can be defined through its privileging of the visual. The privileging of [End Page 263] the visual in Cartesian perspectivalism, Jay suggests, was itself reflex to a "regime" or regimen of differentiation, in which techniques for representing space, and specifically for representing space according to laws of natural perspective, came to privilege a disembodied and exteriorized--and masculine--look: "The moment of erotic projection in vision--what St. Augustine had anxiously condemned as 'ocular desire' was lost as the bodies of the painter and viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute eye. Although such a gaze could, of course, still fall on objects of desire . . . it did so largely in the service of a reifying male look that turned its targets into stone. The marmoreal nude drained of its capacity to arouse desire was at least tendentially the outcome of this development" (8). Martin Jay's very choice to study the "scopic regimes of modernity," resting as it does on the premise that "modernity" can be defined in part through a splitting of subject from object, masculine gaze from feminine matter, offers a compelling invitation to step further back in the past to question whether the organization of vision in premodern Europe might be different from what we take as axiomatically "true" or even essential to structures of a transhistorical gender: an appropriative and aggressive "male gaze" projected from a changeless, always recognizable body of a "man," most often onto a female body. Following that lead and taking a look at structures of gendered representation that have been underexamined in the "new art history" and in sociopsychoanalytic studies of the 12 visual, how may we speak of the "scopic regime" of this medieval past? The questions I wish to raise in this article concern bodies that arouse "ocular desire," medieval and even Chaucerian bodies that precede Jay's marmoreal nude, drained vampiritically of her blood. In framing Griselda through a layering of private and public looks, does Chaucer in fact play out male fantasy enacted around a fetishized female body--or does this reading give us a back-formation, a reading of Chaucer through our desire, through a "scopic regime of modernity"? In this article I argue that medieval representational schema for framing the human body as public spectacle or object of a public gaze unsettle post-Cartesian formulations that read the "meaning" of the female body through an inscription by male consciousness and vision. Late medieval accounts of the "focalized" female body, the feminine erotic form as it is seen, watched, and desired by a viewer in a narrative, are deeply nuanced, I will suggest, by anxieties about bodily images and by contemporary schema for representing the body in the visual arts: the textual body, however overdetermined by the rhetorical tradition, is also a cultural body, regulated and exposed by lines of sight that are tightly bound to schema for representing the painted or the plastic body in [End Page 264] contemporary manuscript illumination, panel painting, or statuary. The article will then return to Chaucer's Clerk's Tale to explore some implications of late medieval visuality for Chaucer's construction of lines of sight and especially for his figuration of the dynamic between male gaze and a female body in this tale. The Gaze on Jesus Crucified In medieval representation, the body at the center, the spectacular body, is not, of course, female at all. This is not to say that the female body is absent from medieval representation--although the particular eroticized form of the female "nude," it has been claimed, was unrepresented or unrepresentable between the classical era and the Italian 13 renaissance, effaced in the medieval rejection of the body as a subject of representation that, as Michael Camille has said, "is one of the most crucial transformations in the history 14 of Western art." Yet the body favored for display, consistently shown as naked and undressed, sagging with material weight of muscle and bone, and also the body that consistently focuses a collective gaze through its display before a crowd, is the body of Christ. In her aptly-titled recent study, Sarah Beckwith points to just this formation as a schema, where Christ's body focuses a "complex symbolics of identification and role15 playing" and serves as an "arena" for the negotiation of social identities. The importance of Christ's body as a spectacle to a wide public, male and female, clerical and lay, has been

the subject of some of the most important recent historical scholarship in medieval studies-work that collectively suggests, indeed, that it is difficult to overemphasize the importance of the image of Christ's body as a figure in daily devotion; as a visual presence in all forms of representation, from manuscript illumination to wall painting on country churches; as subject, complexly gendered and desired, for ecstatic contemplation; or, even as it is parsed as the common text of blasphemy, "goddes bones" or "goddes blood." Recent studies of lay piety in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have taken as their subject the spectacle of the Mass itself, centered in late medieval piety around a ritual of the visible, the elevation of the Host that in effect displays a man in a wafer. Miri Rubin and Eamon Duffy have both pointed recently to the importance that this visible display came to take in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century popular piety--such that, as Duffy writes, "seeing the Host 16 became the high point of lay experience of the Mass." The centrality that Christ's body occupies in medieval representations of corporeality unsettles, I believe, later schema that have theorized [End Page 265] visuality according to binarist and heterosexist divisions between male/female, gaze and body. If we take as axiomatic a psychoanalytic formulation of visuality in which taboos and prerogatives defining lines of sight originate in anxieties about castration, how can we formulate the gaze in a system of representation whose central spectacular body is the body of a man? Since the very concept of a "phallic gaze" emerges from a regime of the visual that splits vision as male and the object of the gaze as paradigmatically female, can we speak of a "phallic gaze" in medieval representation--if the central body in that system of representation is not female at all? And what bearing, if any, does the prominence of Christ's body in late medieval representation have on descriptions of bodies and the people who look at them in medieval narratives, such as Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, which seems to locate a female body strategically at the center of both an individual and a public masculine gaze? To a certain extent, Michael Camille's book The Gothic Idol, has begun to address some of these questions through its examination of the proscriptions on bodily representation in early medieval art and the recovery of the body for play between sacred and profane boundaries in representation of the later Middle Ages. In the section "Woman on a Pedestal," Camille suggests that the "phallic gaze" in medieval representation is often depicted with considerable ambivalence and shown as a vexed or problematic look. Residual taboos against idolatry come to be expressed in clerical proscriptions about looking at the human, and especially female, body, Camille argues; and the conflict between clerical prohibition and the impulse to see produces a set of curiously hybridized cultural forms, the most familiar of which is courtly love, with its conflation of erotic, sacred, and ecstatic imagery to describe desire for an idealized woman ( GI 304). This gendered and "phallic gaze" is most often represented, as Camille notes, in images crafted for private, elitist use, as in the love scenes that decorate medieval ivories (GI 309). 17 A phallic gaze cannot adequately describe, however, the visual dynamics that circulate around Christ's body, which becomes, by the fourteenth century, a central focus of visual 18 desire in lay piety and in meditative writing by both men and women. One of the distinguishing features of devotional art and literature in the late Middle Ages, both in England and on the Continent, is the emphasis on a desire to see, a pressure to what I might call, however oxymoronically, "tactile visualization," that develops themes from Cistercian meditation into a form of piety whose chief pressure is the very act of visual participation in the events of the Passion and of Christ's Life. The centrality of visual experience and empathy to late medieval devotion has been well documented in studies of both devotional [End Page 266] imagery and of meditative 19 literature. Here I would like to consider in particular, however, the ways that the gaze on Christ's body in some of these accounts both disrupts distance and conventional marks of gender. Descriptions of a "phallic gaze," especially as formulated in recent work in film theory and also as described in Foucault's account of the historical emergence of a disciplinary and controlling look, repeatedly imply that the power of the gaze of a viewing subject to control or coerce its object depends upon a strategic maintenance of spatial distance. The look within the movie house depends upon a voyeuristic darkened space that

preserves the isolated (and male) viewing subject while offering an illusion of plenitude and proximity on the screen; a gaze within regimes of technologized surveillance operates through the fantasy of its invisibility, projected across an untrackable space from an unseen "eye of power." Descriptions of the uses of vision in late medieval devotional texts, however, focus insistently on an "eye of piety" (oculis pietatis) that fractures distance, fusing self with the 20 objects of devotional desire in a hybridized mix of maternal, infantile, and erotic impulses. In many late medieval lyrics and devotional texts, visual desire expresses delectation rather than intellectation, the pleasure of losing the self in the returned gaze of the one we love. In their emphases on a look through which the self is engulfed by, taken up in, and merged with the desired other, these texts describe a gaze that seems more preoedipal than oedipal, more intersubjective than haptic in its desires; they also describe a gaze that is more fully explained by object relations than by Freudian theory. In a reformulation of Freud's theories of psychic development, object relations theory as developed by Winnicott and others argues that the intact ego emerges from introjection, a taking-in of the other, 21 rather than from projection of one's own fears of bodily mutilation. Central to object relations theory, which stages a powerful critique of Freudian and even Lacanian ego psychology, is the importance of recapitulated interactions with external others, chief among whom is the mother, encountered primally through preoedipal attachment and only 22 secondarily through fears of castration. A brief passage in an account from a history of the first Dominicans (from before 1269) describes a devotional practice that enacts just this visual relation, dissolving distance and facilitating the fusion of the self with an imaginary other: "In their cells they had before their eyes images of her [the Virgin] and of her crucified Son so that while reading, praying, and sleeping, they could look upon them and be looked upon by them [the images], with the 23 eyes of compassion [oculis pietatis]." In the Dominican historian's account, the "eye of piety" is mirrored and reciprocal: its gaze is not unidirectional, but intersubjective, specular, [End Page 267] and emotional, with the special function, even in the private space of the monk's cell, to reenact empathy. The placement of images within the cell so that the monk may have them available as facilitators of compassion while praying, reading, and even sleeping suggests that the special action of an intersubjective gaze belongs to the most intimate and private parts of daily life. Fusing both birth and death, the self with the Virgin and the dying Christ, the reciprocated gaze in the Dominican text invokes intimate exchange with domestic life and vital rites of passage. It also seems to contrast markedly with a "phallic" or oedipal gaze that would protect its subject from threats of castration and from risks of fusion with the maternal. Rather, the gaze described in the Dominican biographer's account, enacting in daily devotions a ritual of intersubjectivity, points to an interactive, fusive, even tactile act. Vision performs an act of touch. The gaze in this account also seems independent of gendered prohibitions or distinctions, for the oculis pietatis is projected by a man in an exchange of real and imaginary gazes with images that include both the Virgin as well as the crucified Christ. That labile, boundarycrossing nature of this gaze, its circulation rather indiscriminately between the private self and both male and female loved devotional images, also suggests that gender is not the first or prime determinant of its trajectory or, I should say, its desire. This play with categories of gender, a kind of passing, is a marked feature of late medieval devotional language and imagery generally, appearing in Middle English passion lyrics and also in meditative guides and texts describing a desired interchange of gazes between the worshipper and the holy family. As I have described elsewhere, accounts of a woman's gaze in late medieval literature occur most often and most dramatically in Passion lyrics, where the Virgin's empathetic, suffering gaze on her son on the Cross engages his returned 24 look as well as the gaze of the reader/spectator. The representation of gender in scenes that are centered around the spectacle of Christ's body on display, that is to say, allows for a fluid set of gazes that seem surprisingly free from laws of decorum and sexual taboo that come to codify or categorize desires, fixing the rhetoric of the visual according to predetermined familial or sexual fictions of nation, communities that invest those fictions with ideological or even legal status: we/they; family/sexual partner; man/woman; adult/child; licit/illicit. The Virgin gazes on Christ, both as infant and as Crucifix; Christ looks

on his mother and commands her to look ("Stond well, moder, under rode! Bihold thy sone 25 with glade mode" ); the reader begs the Virgin to look on him or her ("Thy merciful eene 26 [eyes] and lufly [loving] loke / Cast opon us for oure disporte [pleasure]" [no. 182] ); the reader, male or female, gazes in an ecstasy of love and dread as Christ's speaking body [End Page 268] on the Cross commands him or her to study his wounds "(Man and woman that by me gase [go] / Luke up to me and stint [stop] thy pase [pace] / For thee I sched my blode" [no. 211; see also nos. 215-18]). A closer look at a fourteenth-century Passion lyric can illustrate the drive to fracture visual distance through meditation. In this poem the speaking body on the Cross commands both men and women to stop and study his wounds, setting in motion a move to a tactile closeup. Christ invites us to use the verbal image, the poem, as a kind of touchable and turnable Crucifix, and commands us to use vision as a direct access to shared pain: Man and wyman, loket to me, u michel pine ich olede [suffered] for e; Loke up-one mi rig [back], u sore ich was i-biten; Loke to mi side, wat Blode ich haue i-leten. mine uet [feet] an mine honden nailed beth to e rode;

of e ornes prikung min hiued urnth [flow] a blode. fram side to side, fro hiued to the fot, turn mi bodi abuten, oueral man, for in hurte, e vif wndes u findest blod.

in hurte thu turne to me, e ich tholede for e.

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The speaking Christ from the Cross invokes the reader's gaze and then takes him or her through a visual tour of the tortured body, ending in a moment of integration where the body and the viewer come to suffer the same pain. The increasing erasure of boundaries between Christ and his audience, the passing, is performed through a doubled language; that is, Christ's speech not only invites the viewer's gaze, his body also facilitates the reader's empathetic transformation. After demanding that the reader look at his side, his feet and hands, and his head pierced with thorns, Christ asks the viewer/reader to perform two turns, one of them a "turn" of the body to reveal that blood is everywhere and the other a "turn" of his or her own empathy toward that bleeding body. The pierced "side" of his body in line 4 invites, a few lines later, the reader's "side to side" scrutiny; the "pain" (line 2) Christ suffers activates and redeems the "hurte" (line 9) in the viewer. While the voice initially speaks across distance, as if stopping a passerby and commanding him or her to stop and look, it initiates a series of visual moves that brings the viewer into even tactile intimacy. Yet the authoritative voice is never really muffled in this lyric. Indeed, the commanding narrative voice seems dissonant with the intense intersubjective drama that the poem enacts. This doubled or multiple voiding, an imbrication of authority (the speaking Crucifix) with a passionate piety that fractures hierarchy and distance is hardly anomalous, [End Page 269] however, and in fact could be called the essence of late medieval devotion, underwriting not only Marian laments but also traditional Crucifixion scenes in late medieval English wall and panel painting. Christ's body, in effect, hangs on a paradox: on the one hand the object of desire in an intense, reciprocal close-up, the touchable sight, it is also a highly strategic visual performative in rituals of clerical display. How, I would like to ask, does the representation of Christ in images of the Crucifixion, the image that in effect iconizes nudity for premodern representation, define and even shape the terms of visual desire? How does this multiple structure of the visual, in which a formalized and even

rhetoricized gaze operates simultaneously with a gaze whose object is to cross the very boundaries or separations that vision intrinsically acknowledges, help us define a "regime of the visual" for premodern representation? To address this question, and more pertinently, to address the broader question of "the gaze" in late fourteenth-century England, I would like to look locally, if briefly, at material evidence, and more specifically, at Crucifixion images in fourteenth-century English painting, with particular attention to the trajectories of vision within these paintings--to the ways figures both look and choose not to look at each other and also engage with the looks of the audience. Representations of the Crucifixion in surviving premodern English images often display Christ's body within a highly conventional schema, the linear but iconic tableau vivant (and mort). In scenes of this type, at the right of the Cross Mary wrings her hands, while on the left John writes on or holds his book, both of them in effect propping the horizontal arms of the Cross with their vertical 28 forms. Until the importation of increasingly narrativized Passion scenes in the early fifteenth century, this schema dominates English representations and is the locus for Christ's most frequent appearances in surviving painted panels, wall paintings, and 29 manuscript illumination. Even in the fifteenth century, however, the linear Crucifixion remains the singularly visible display; as Eamon Duffy points out, fifteenth-century English churches were visually dominated by the huge Crucifixions on the rood-screens separating the high altar from the nave--even though all that remains on most of these screens are the images of the attendant saints. The restored rood-screen at Eye in Suffolk and the Doom tympanum at Wenhaston, Suffolk, where the monumental figure of Christ and the flanking figures of Mary and John are still visible in outline, typify this highly conventional 30 representational scheme. Also similar in design are the small Crucifixion below St. Faith in a Westminster Abbey wall painting, the 1330-40 Crucifixion on the east wall of the chancel at Brent Eleigh (Suffolk), the Crucifixion in the De Lisle Psalter, and the Thornham Parva Retable, a beautifully [End Page 270] worked early fourteenth-century East Anglian set of painted panels that was probably made for the high altar at a Dominican abbey (see 31 figure 1). What is striking about the formal arrangement of the linear Crucifixion is the complex visual hermeneutic in which it engages its viewers. In most surviving examples of earlier fourteenth-century English Crucifixions, particularly the images that survive from wall paintings and from painted retables, the display seems to be hung on a paradox of visual invitation and prohibition, inviting visual touch even as it freezes the look through proscription: noli me tangere. Through strategies of formal centering Crucifixion images make a powerful appeal to the spectator's gaze (placed above the chancel arch at the center of the rood-screen; set on or behind the altar; marking the dedication page of a manuscript). Lateral images composed of the triple figures of Christ, Mary, and John also invite and focus our gaze through an epiphanic resolve, schematized in the coercive overlay of angles and curves, what we might call the "s" and "t" form of the Crucifixion: Christ's body sags as copula against the formal perpendiculars of his Cross. In the Thornham Parva Crucifixion, the bodies of both Mary and John thrust toward the central image, mimicking Christ in their bodily sway even as their gestures enact alternative reactions to loss, itself graphically rendered through the predominance of blank space, or more precisely through the diapered background between the figures. The Virgin, wringing her hands, bends her left elbow in a gesture of cradling, while her knee, in an unusual gesture, touches her son's knee; St. John, even as his stance formally mimics hers, responds as contemplative--his chin on his right hand and a book in his left. At the same time that gesture balances and reinforces the tensions resolved through the scene's angular drama, the agon of the s and the t, the lines of sight within the image paradoxically turn away from the image. In the Thornham Parva Crucifixion, the averted gazes of the flanking saints Peter and Paul throw the central Crucifixion into dramatic relief, releasing it into a separate plane of time and narrative. Gestures of Mary and John also contribute to this narrative dislocation, for in the Crucifixion's stylized yet richly expressive bodily drama, the Virgin's thrust elbow conveys not only cradling, but also defensive parrying, a self-protective gesture defending herself from the horror of her son's death. With this withdrawal she also cloisters her own gaze, for while she appears to look up at his face

on the Cross, she turns her own face partly away. John, on Christ's left, mimics her bodily lines and averted look, but with an even more specifically abstracted gaze, leaning on his hand in a gesture that signifies his interiority. The aversion or sidelong gaze of participants within the narrative [End Page 271] [Begin Page 273] space of the image is a convention that we often find in medieval English Crucifixion scenes, appearing, for example, in a Westminster Abbey Crucifixion in St. 33 34 35 Faith's Chapel, the De Lisle Psalter Crucifixion, the Norwich Psalter, and in the 36 Salisbury and Evesham Psalters. In the Salisbury and Evesham Crucifixions, Mary and John stand below the arms of the Cross in mirrored postures, facing the Cross but looking into a transecting third space such that their gazes neither focus on the Passion nor meet our own. By the late fourteenth century increasingly complex narrative forms were being introduced into English representation, such as the Deposition, the Lamentation, the Man of 37 Sorrows, and the crowded, Italianate narrative Crucifixion image; and increasingly Christ's body figures at the center of a scene that emphasizes intra and extra-diegetic empathy, coercing a complexly engaged gaze from the spectator as well as from 38 participants within the picture. In the lateral Crucifixion scenes that dominate Crucifixion imagery in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, where one or both of the flanking figures turns away from the body on the Cross, the internal averted gaze allows the Passion image itself extraordinary iconic purchase over its public. Even while the averted look and gestures of the mourners at the Cross communicate private suffering, the reactive bodies of those mourners graphically physicalize pain; and by showing that the image itself is too painful to look on, these gestures effect a temporal dislocation that gives the body on the Cross increased public authority. The averted gazes of Mary or John--and in the case of the Thornham Parva Retable, of St. Peter and St. Paul as well--allows the body to float free of narrative. Independent of familial time, that is, the body on the Cross is on display for a larger public. The authority or publicity of the English Crucifixion, psychically engineered through the visual disengagement and terror of internal viewers, is also engineered in numberless ways by strategies for formal display that place Christ's body at the center of collective lines of sight: we have only to think of the importance of the Crucifixion page in the medieval manuscript, the centrality of the Crucifixion in sequences of narrative scenes of Christ's life, the dominance of the image as iconographic subject in fourteenth-century English wall 39 painting, the placement of the crucifixion rood-screen as the central vanishing point in the late medieval church. Half of surviving English retables have a central Crucifixion, a fact 40 that underscores the centrality of this scene in the visual drama of the Mass. In an extraordinary account of the actual process of making a Crucifix, a Cistercian chronicle also offers a window into the practical aesthetics of monastic uses of images. Recognizing the value of public display of its Crucifix, a late fourteenth-century chronicler from the Cistercian Abbey of Meaux in Yorkshire adopts a strikingly [End Page 273] material tone. In sculpting the image of Christ, the sculptor used a live model: "moreover, he had a naked man before him to look at, that he might learn from his shapely form and carve the crucifix all the fairer. When therefore this crucifix was set up, the almighty constantly sought many solemn and manifest miracles through it; wherefore we thought that if women had access to the said crucifix, the common devotion would be increased and would redound to the great profit of 41 our monastery." In a clear-eyed take on the value of images to monastic well-being, this statement may also describe, through the proximity of topics if not through the logic, the particular appeal of this Crucifix, modeled on a naked man, to female spectators. There is no suggestion of taboo, masquerade, or transgression, a female gaze exceeding bounds of decorum, but rather a calculated, therefore/wherefore manipulation of spectacle for profit, though the nature of the "profit" is not spelled out: the Crucifix will be carved, women will 42 come to look at it, the monastery will benefit. The importance of the Crucifixion as an image signifying public authority in fourteenth-century England is also suggested by account books that record important royal or clerical gifts, such as the 1394 gift of a 43 Crucifixion to Richard II by the Duke of Burgundy, or the gift of a missal, in which the most important illustration is a full-page Crucifixion, by Nicholas Lytlington, abbot of Westminster (96). The gift of the Norwich Retable, the so-called

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Despencer Retable (see figure 2), to Norwich Cathedral also suggests a traditional and 44 even strategically authoritarian presentation. The Retable, which boasts a central Crucifixion, also contains the arms, in glass in the frame, of men who helped to suppress the 1381 rebellion (Henry Despencer, Sir Stephen Hales, Sir Thomas Morieux). Based on these coats of arms, it has been suggested that the panel was a thank-you to powerful 45 Norwich families for their help in suppression of the rebellion. If the Despencer Retable was given to the Cathedral, as has been speculated, in or near 1381, the date of the gift 46 would also match the earliest accounts documenting reaction to Wycliffite iconoclasm, a coincidence that would allow us to speculate that it may have been a complexly strategic gift, nuanced by contemporary challenges to both class hegemony and clerical authority; a 47 gift to the high altar, the Retable is expensive, conservative, English, and orthodox. A strategic affirmation of clerical power is, however, only part of the "meaning" of the retable, for the panels also construct community around the certainty of both shared human vulnerability and also around the dual validity of alternative knowledges-around two forms of response, one based on emotion and the other based on ocular skepticism, the gaze that affirms truth. The operations of the gazes [End Page 274] within the central panel work in ways that are similar to the Thornham Parva panel, for the reactions of the paired groups on either side of the Cross suggest entirely different possible reactions to the death, one emotional and empathetic, the near-swoon of the Virgin, and the other analytical, the Centurion's instruction on sacred evidence to the two Jews (presumably) behind him (see figure 3). We can also say that the Virgin's averted gaze gives the body over, in effect, to the congregation, a transference in part enacted through the Centurion and the skeptical public he instructs. Christ's body draws beneath its arms both feminine pain and domesticity and a male analytic. Visibility Politics The uses of Christ's body in the Cistercian abbey of Meaux and in important pieces such as the Despencer Retable point to the power of strategic display and of a gaze that operates through the very rituals of distancing. The highly public role of the English Crucifixion invites us to consider, that is to say, that the psychic structures of visual fantasy may be shaped as much by what is available to be seen or by cultural arts of display as by interpersonal and familial relationships in early childhood (as twentieth-century psychoanalysis proposes); and that an image widely represented, such as Christ's body pendant on the Cross or even dandled on Mary's arm, assumes a powerful purchase on visual desire by its very publicity. Much of contemporary discourse on the gaze and its objects, in fact, is itself based on images that are shaped as spectacle--made visible not just through private or elitist representation, but offered through technologies of display, or through display that is itself [End Page 275] [Begin Page 277] technologized: we speak of "the" gaze in film, because the private look is repeatedly generalized and constructed through a commercial enterprise that depends on multiple viewers that number in the thousands or even millions, such that an image, always perceived by a single eye, is arrested before a collective identity. Guy Debord in his oft-cited study of images in capitalist cultures, Society of the Spectacle, writes of the ways that spectacle, with its technologies of display, paradoxically works through separation to create a false consciousness of social unity: "The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as an instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but 48 an official language of generalized separation." Debord's critique of the structure of spectacle, applicable to the commercial or culturally coded display of the body in the mass media, may be applicable as well to the public exposure of Christ's body in formal devotional images such as the English Crucifixion. Although Debord addresses mass production, his argument that spectacle involves systematized forms of projection also contains within it a recognition that the spectacularizing of the image, or the projection of the body as a public spectacle, sets in motion a liquid set of moves, identificatory and projective, that manipulate desire, such that spectacle becomes a favored medium of political or commercial/capitalist regimes. In the twentieth-century West, the image of the female body, or even the female body itself in its very actions, cannot, I believe, be

separated from its public, commercial life--the omnipresent, ever multiplying image of the beautiful female body as a central icon for desire. However apparently naturalized or essentialized, desire as it comes into play around the image of the female body attaches to or snags on attributes of gender as signs of material goods, the beautiful body as the most visible fetish in a commodity culture. When we look at Madonna or at Cindy Crawford or the unnamed model on the Cosmopolitan cover--whether on MTV or displayed on the rack at the supermarket check-out--our single or even private look is always ensnared in a certain collectivity, as we look on an image crafted for a public that cuts across a wide swath of classes, races, and genders. Whether we look on the scantily-draped, provocatively gazing model on the Cosmo cover as festishized display of an oedipal threat (looking as a man) or as a homoerotic projection (looking as a woman?), fundamental to our reception of the image is its prior instantiation as schema, and as schema that catalyzes desire through commodity fetishism: the image on which we collectively gaze has already been coded for desire--to have what she wears, to have a body like hers, to have her jouissance or her [End Page 277] youth, to have her. In regimes of the visible in the twentieth-century West, the most salient feature of the spectacular female body is its coding for public consumption.
49

When we return to the organization of medieval spectacle around images of Christ's body, Debord's suggestion that a culture assumes a shared public identity through the images it holds up as spectacle (or is entranced before) offers a model for describing visuality as strategic staging, a set of abstracted power relations that depend on collective fantasy-though the operations of visual fantasy may operate in significantly different ways. In late medieval representation, Christ's crucified body, however private its devotional use, can never be fully detached from its prior coding as a public image, and especially from its prior coding as an image intimately connected with money and power; beautiful images of the Crucifixion were available to the masses for viewing chiefly in churches--and even there, 50 they were veiled and hidden from view at certain times in the liturgical calendar. As "the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness," the public body in a sense masks its own gaze or subjectivity, instituting itself over the gaze by proclaiming its authority through its very visibility and display. An investiture of power in the body displayed, rather than in the subject that views that body, is consistent with the workings of visuality that Foucault describes for pre-nineteenthcentury Western regimes. To be seen, to be the center of collective visibility, once defined power, Foucault has argued; to be unseen, unrepresentable, defined one's status as powerless. Technologies of surveillance, however, inverted this relationship, masking the eye of power ("Big Brother is Watching You") and turning exposure and publicity into 51 definitive signs of humiliation: For a long time the ordinary individuality--the everyday individuality of everybody--remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privilege. The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, was written as he lived out his life as part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination. . . . The turning of real lives into writing [representation] is no longer a 52 procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection. To be the object of the gaze, that is, was paradoxically to be the "subject," the center of attention--in striking contrast to at least some of the dynamics at work in twentieth-century bodily display where, as Peggy Phelan wryly puts it in Unmarked, "if representational visibility equals [End Page 278] power, then almost-naked white women should be running Western culture" (U 10). Foucault's account of Western visibility politics, outlined in a few broad strokes, is richly suggestive for an understanding of the uses of Christ's body in the late Middle Ages. For although Christ's body is represented as the sacrificial center of lines of sight in fourteenth-century English churches or dramatized and exposed at the center of clerical ritual that claims the viewer's gaze, that body asserts the primacy of its visibility over the privilege or authority of the act of seeing. The dominance of the image in fourteenth-

century spectacle supports and even, we might say, fleshes out Foucault's analysis of modernist regimes of visuality, allowing us to suggest that the structure of the gaze in premodern England reverses or inverts the "scopic regime of modernity." Visibility, to-beseen-ess, is not to be exposed, known, focused under the lens of a distanced and controlling eye, but quite the reverse: to be seen and to command the gaze of others is to control visual relations, to be moved from the edge to the center, to be, in effect, like Christ. As increasing demands for visual knowledge of Christ's body in fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury devotional writing attest, however, Christ's body came to be at center stage in an increasingly clamorous and disruptive theater of visual desire. The paradox of authority dramatized by the speaking body on the Cross who, as in the Passion lyric discussed above, demands our gaze, even as we fracture visual distances to use and essentially merge with the image, confounds any easy ways we might formulate a "scopic regime of the Middle Ages." For there is clearly no regime, or at least no single one. Christ's body can best be described as the center of an intense visual drama, even a struggle for possession, and as a figure that in effect queers desires, allows the incestuous, the homoerotic, the lesbian, the class-phantasmatic, to "pass": Christ is the ideogram of the passing self. Kathleen Biddick's descriptions of Christ's body as "both a 'classical' body in the Bakhtinian sense, elevated, static, and monumental, and a 'grotesque' body, broken, bleeding, excessive, maternal, paternal, a body which upset any fixed gender binary, a fluid body that troubled any container," may describe as well the fluidity of visual relations that surround 53 that body. If it is possible that Christ's body, particularly as abstracted in the Host, offered a nongendered or even a queerly gendered spectacle that served to define social identities and hegemony, as Biddick suggests, even as it offers an image that acknowledges transgressive desires, how might this help to explore fictive representations of spectacle, and specifically of the body as subject of a gaze in contexts that are not overtly devotional? When we return to Chaucer, her premise that Christ's body as spectacle centers cultural performances of identity in [End Page 279] the late Middle Ages is even useful, I think, for understanding Chaucer's representations of lines of sight framing the female body in The Clerk's Tale. Chaucer's female form, displayed before a public gaze, I suggest, loses the mark of gender in an iconic denaturing. When Chaucer locates a female body at the center of male public spectacle, the binarisms of male gaze/female body invert or even collapse: male gazes look back on the self, potent female looks return masculine ones, and bodies disembody or iconize into abstraction before a collective stare. Griselda's Body In The Clerk's Tale, Griselda's body, the object of both public and private scrutiny, is curiously absent--at least at the point where it is formalized as spectacle within a public regime. In this text, framed by detailed accounts of how she is dressed into her identity as queen and then undressed back into a peasant, Griselda's body seems to be displaced in translation, as if the moment "Whan she translated was in swich richesse" (l. 385) transforms her into the unrepresentable, or into an iconic form, a relic of sorts, that is the 54 object of pilgrimage and of public visual devotion and even investigation. The text offers a complex tension between an eroticized body and repression of its own eroticizing hints, such that the body is repeatedly recast through the indices of her voice and face. When Walter is first described as looking at her, the narrator is careful to define the constraints on his gaze, to define how it is he doesn't gaze on her--not "with wantown lookyng of folye" (l. 236) but "in sad wyse / Upon hir chiere." The oxymoronic definition of the body as site of sexual potential and as center of virtue is given full play in the extraordinary two lines describing how her heart is contained within her virginity, as if her virginity were a kind of palpable skin, the membrane of her hymen transferred to her breast: But thogh this mayde tendre were of age, Yet in the brest of hire virginitee Ther was enclosed rype and sad corage;

(218-20) Within the protective membrane of her virginity, these lines suggest, is her heart, older and wiser than her virgin flesh would have her, as if the paradox of her interiority were simply a wisdom that belies her "tendre" years. Yet the language with which Chaucer describes her virtue never departs far from embodiment, and specifically from its imaging of the body as a vessel. [End Page 280] Central to this image, and central to the representation of Griselda throughout the tale, is an investigative gaze, however metaphoric, searching her, peeling away layers like skins of an onion. Defined by interiority or by the paradoxes between what can be known on the surface and what might lurk below it, Griselda centers a desire to know and to see that fuels 55 the looks of both Walter and his people. Yet even though her body is initially framed--if quickly veiled--as object of the gaze, when it is translated by a queen's dress, it is absent from representation. When people come from afar to see her, what is it they see or look for? Describing how the people look on her--why they come and where they come from--the text suggests that the spectacle of Griselda is fueled by curiosity about her legitimacy, such that the traces on the body are not traces so much of gender but of class (her peasant origins). As the text describes public curiosity about her, it convolutes in a linguistic replay of the public uncertainties about her origins: Unnethe trowed they--but dorste han swore-That to Janicle, of which I spak bifore, She doghter were, for, as by conjecture, Hem thought she was another creature. (403-6) Conjecture and memory conflict with appearance, and specifically with the public spectacle of Griselda's transformation from one of them to one of the ruling elite. One of the curious shifts in the transformation of Griselda is her change from what we might call normalcy to exoticism, or perhaps pathology, a transformation that is paralleled by the repression of her body. That is, when we first encounter her, she is clearly delineated with a few broad strokes: she chops and boils cabbages for her dinner, she sleeps on a hard bed. She is marked by human desires and curiosity: when she hears that Walter's bride will be riding by, she positions herself at the doorway to catch a glimpse of her. Once she marries Walter, however, she recedes into incomprehensibility, becoming as remote from the reader's logic as she is from Walter's--or for that matter, as remote and incomprehensible in motive as is Walter himself. Parallel to this transformation, or translation into inscrutability, is the repression of her body-even as her interiority, in some form, becomes Walter's obsessive concern. As object of the gaze, Griselda takes on an iconic visibility that paradoxically effaces her feminine body, becoming, especially as the object of pilgrimage, a kind of relic whose truth can only be taken on faith. The spectacularizing of her body is parallel to its repression or to its shift into sign--a point that the Clerk makes when he [End Page 281] comments that Griselda only makes sense as a sign--and specifically as one that shows us how to be "constant in adversitee" (1146). But if her body is absent, what is it that Walter and "alle the peple" see? Certainly her voice and "chiere"--though we know no details about her appearance. The framing of Griselda as spectacle is deeply shaped, I believe, by visual iconic schema, a collective religiosity that is repeatedly invoked by typological innuendo. As readers have noted, Griselda at the threshold holding her water jug when Walter enters evokes Mary in the Annunciation; she is a type of Job; stripped publicly of her clothes and humiliated, she uncannily echoes Christ. 56 In this shifting process of innuendo and identification, what remains constant about Griselda is the role of her translated body as text or even as elevated Host: the narrative

looks at Griselda in an inquisition to confirm faith or doubt. And in this transformation or iconic denaturing into sacramental sign, a sign of the very sacrament of marriage, perhaps, her body not only loses its materiality but also loses its markers of gender--even at the same time that she, or at least she as Walter's Galatea and nemesis, remains in a state of hypertrophic femininity. In a sense she serves as a complex 57 object/sign and symptom of domestic ordering as well as a sign of the multiple tangents of cultural and devotional capital. One might say, of course, that Griselda ceases to own a body as she ceases to represent available sexuality--that as she moves into the sphere of domesticity she takes on the familial mantle, and is protected from view. But the narrative's tensions between her intractable invisibility and the public scrutiny of her allow me to suggest that this tale, and her role within it, describe a tension specific to late medieval cultural imaging: on the one hand Griselda defines the feminine as object of a gaze, and on the other she demonstrates a simultaneous reluctance to capture, hold down, or use the female body as an image in representation. That is, I would argue that some of the tensions in this tale emerge from a conflict between a desire to pin down and focus the wife's body, to focalize it within a domesticating and/or sexualizing gaze, and a desire or habit of using the iconic body as a sign of authority. Transformed echoically into a devotional body that directs us through its figuration of both our desires for transformation and our desires for subjection to exterior authority, Griselda commands from her very invisibility. The question we need to return to finally is Chaucer's stake in the repression of the spectacularized female body. For Chaucer, of course, does represent vision as both powerful and erotic, and certainly writes highly physical descriptions of women's bodies-though the occasion for such accounts may be predetermined by either class or peephole domestic eroticism, the demystified animal peasant body of Alisoun in The Miller's Tale, or the fetishized body of Criseyde, viewed across a [End Page 282] private and darkened room. Yet the particular construction of a female body by, and we might say for, a male gaze, particularly when that body is centered as spectacle, is not, I suggest, central to Chaucer's formulations of visuality. Centered as spectacle, as in The Clerk's Tale, the body seems even to escape categorical definition by gender through assimilation with devotional schema. Inflected by its incorporation of sacred allusion, Griselda's body is also inflected by doubled and contradictory codes that govern how bodies, both sacred and profane, can be seen and known--codes that had their origins, as Michael Camille has argued, in early taboos on idolatry that until the Renaissance suppressed the imaging of the female body. In its shift into sign, and in particular in its translatio into sacred relic, her body is also transformed by cultural practice; and specifically, her body and visibility are transformed by conventions of bodity representation in premodern England in which Christ's body repeatedly appears at the center of rituals of public display and in which Christ's body, flexibly gendered, stands in for both male and female corporeality. Griselda's body, in its powerful evocation of unknowability, returns us uncannily and inevitably to the schema and to the power of the schema to condense centrifugally as a regime or discipline. What we see, or what we choose to see, is what we know. College of the Holy Cross Sarah Stanbury is Associate Professor of English at The College of the Holy Cross. She is the author of Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception (1991) and coeditor (with Linda Lomperis) of Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (1993). She is completing a book, The Vision Contest in Premodern England. Notes 1. All citations from Chaucer refer to The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston, 1987). 2. Some of the texts most frequently cited and most influential in their exploration of relationships among narrative and the visual and phantasmatic structure of the oedipal struggle include Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema

(Bloomington, 1984), pp. 112ff.; Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," rpt. in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Theory Reader (New York, 1992), pp. 22-34, hereafter cited in text as VP; Luce Irigaray's 1977 discussion of the oedipal gaze in This Sex Which is Not One, tr. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, 1985), pp. 25-26; Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator," Screen, 23, nos. 3-4 (September-October 1982), 74-87; E. Ann Kaplan, "Is the Gaze Male?" in Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York, 1983), pp. 23-35. 3. For a brief overview of the debate about Jacques Lacan's placement of women within psychical systems of visuality, see Laura Mulvey, "Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative, and Historical Experience," in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, 1989), pp. 164-66; Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (New York, 1986), pp. 49-81; see also Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 116-17, 135-38, 148-50; for a discussion of Foucault's analysis of the politics of surveillance, see Griselda Pollock, "Feminism/Foucault-Surveillance/Sexuality," in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover, N.H., 1994), pp. 1-41, hereafter cited in text as VC; see also Mary Ann Doane, who argues both that Lacan's theories of the gaze cannot be attached to gender and also that Foucault's discussion of Bentham's Panopticon, while not specifically framed as an exploration of gender, builds an uncanny analogy between the inmate and woman as ones who sense themselves under surveillance (Mary Ann Doane, "Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in Film Theory," in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan [New York, 1990], pp. 51-53 and 224, n. 13; hereafter cited in text as RW). 4. See, for instance, Norman Lavers, "Freud, The Clerk's Tale, and Literary Criticism," College English, 16 (1964), 184; and Patricia Cramer, "Lordship, Bondage, and the Erotic: The Psychological Bases of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 89 (October 1990), 491-511; hereafter cited in text. 5. The imbrication between naming and ideological or identity formation has been forcibly demonstrated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's argument, which itself buildgs on Michel Foucalt's History of Sexuality, vol. 1, that the emergence of the term "homosexual" in the nineteenth century was simultaneous with the emergence of the concept of "homosexuality" as a central facet of identity (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet [Berkeley, 1990], pp. 8-9). 6. Doane notes that the theoretical claims of film theory have led to a certain paralysis in the field: "Psychoanalysis has been activated in feminist film theory primarily in order to dissect and analyze the spectator's psychical investment in the film. But to accomplish this, theory had to post a vast synchrony of the cinema . . . and its image of woman is always subservient to voyeuristic and fetishistic impulses. . . . Within such a problematic, resistance can only be conceptualized through the idea of 'reading against the grain'" ("Remembering Women," 48). Other critiques have claimed that early theories of visuality posited by feminist film theory were based on an oedipal model that disavows preoedipal attachments; see, for instance, Edward Snow, "Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems," Representations, 25 (Winter 1989), 30-41; Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), p. 15; and my essay, "The Gaze on the Body of Pearl's Dead Girl," in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 96115. 7. Teresa de Lauretis has argued that feminism's continuing use of gender as a defining term in its critique of patriarchy reifies gender as category even as it effaces other markers of difference and/of identity: "To continue to pose the question of gender [in terms of sexual difference], once the critique of patriarchy has been fully outlined, keeps feminist thinking bound to the terms of Western patriarchy itself, contained within a conceptual opposition that is 'always already' inscribed in what Fredric Jameson would call the 'political unconscious' of dominant cultural discourses and their underlying 'master narratives'"

(Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender [Bloomington, Ind., 1987], p. 110). Arguing for a political practice of feminism that moves beyond gender as a defining category of identity, de Lauretis's critique can also help illuminate the potential distortions formalized through the very "question of gender" and through the assumption that the category male/or female is necessarily the first and primary marker of identity. 8. Sue-Ellen Case, "Tracking the Vampire," Differences, 3 (Summer 1991), 11. In his essay, "Gricault and 'Masculinity,'" Norman Bryson also adopts a psychoanalytic and oedipal model for the gaze ("man is bearer of the look, and the woman is the object for that looking" [p. 230]), yet performs an important historicization by showing how Gricault's homoerotic representation of the male body was shaped by responses to the Napoleonic regime (in Visual Culture, pp. 228-59). 9. Doane further suggests the need to locate the subject within history: "The desire to add the dimension of diachrony, to historicize, is one way of dismantling the pessimism of apparatus theory. For it opens up the possibility of an escape from its alleged determinism and hence the possibility of change or transformation through attention to the concreteness and specificity of the socio-historical situation" ("Remembering Women," 48). 10. I refer, for instance, to John Berger's oft-cited short Marxist take on the simultaneous development of the female nude as subject in oil painting, the development of laws of perspective focalizing vision through the gaze of an absent and single eye, and regimes of connoisseurship (John Berger, Ways of Seeing [London, 1972]); and Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, 1983). Michel Foucault's studies of the politics of visuality are based in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, as outlined in "The Eye of Power," Power/Knowledge, Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, tr. and ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980); and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977). 11. Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, 1988), p. 3; hereafter cited in text. 12. The term "new art history" has come to designate art historical discourses centered on the image rather than on style and that examine the production of images within the "larger cultural, economic, religious, and social experience of humankind"; see Brendan Cassidy, Introduction to his essay collection, Iconography at the Crossroads, Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23-24 March 1990 (Princeton, 1993), 4. I understand "representation" to function in Griselda Pollock's terms as "a social relation enacted and performed via specific appeals to vision" ("Feminism/Foucault," p. 14). 13. See Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton, 1956), pp. 93, 309-17. 14. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989), p. 94; hereafter cited in text as GI. 15. Sara Beckwith, Christ's Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York, 1993), pp. 4, 23. 16. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven, 1992), p. 96. The early fifteenth-century Lollard priest William Thorpe complained that people would run from his preaching the minute they heard the sacring bell indicating that the host was to be displayed in another part of the church: when "oon knyllide a sacringe belle, and herfor myche peple turned awei fersli, and with greet noyse runnen frowardis me" (p. 98); see also John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. G. Townsend and S. R. Cattley (London, 1837-41), III.63, cited in Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 98; see also Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 131-34, and for a discussion of Corpus Christi processions, see pp. 243-71; see

also Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 54-56; and for an important discussion showing how the Corpus Christi developed as an expression of urban and social ideologies, see Mervyn James, "Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval Town," Past and Present, 98 (1983), 3-29. 17. Michael Camille addresses the importance of Christ's body to the emergent interest in representing the flesh, in his "The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies," in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (New York, 1994), pp. 62-99. 18. The vastly influential Meditations on the Life of Christ, which structures a visual meditation around events and images of Christ's life and death, reflects this urge; note too the importance of this work in late medieval England as reflected in Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, which survives, according to Michael G. Sargent, in fiftysix manuscripts; see his critical edition (New York, 1992), lxiii; see Elizabeth Salter, Nicholas Love's Myrrour of the Blessyd Lyf of Jesu Christ, Analecta Cartusiana, 10 (1974), 119-78; see also discussion by Sarah Beckwith, Christ's Body, pp. 63-70. 19. Jeffrey Hamburger, "The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions," Viator, 20 (1989), 161-96; Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, tr. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1981), esp. pp. 41-64; J. A. W. Bennett, The Poetry of the Passion: Studies in Twelve Centuries of English Verse (Oxford, 1982), pp. 37-40; Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1968), pp. 30-31; John V. Fleming, An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1977); Judith Neaman, "Sight and Insight: Vision and the Mystics," FCEMN, 5 (1979), 2743; Wolfgang Riehle, The Middle English Mystics, tr. Bernard Standring (New York, 1981), pp. 122-25. 20. Maternal Christic imagery has been described most forcefully by Caroline Walker Bynum, "The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg," and "'. . . And Woman His humanity': Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages," in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), pp. 79-117, 181-238; for a counterargument that medieval representation responded to the erotic claims of Christ body, see Richard Trexler, "Gendering Jesus Crucified," in Iconography at the Crossroads, pp. 107-19; see also Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 47, 56, 59, 70 and loc. cit., who argues that a collapsing of categories is central to mystical discourse. 21. Theories of psychic formation that emphasize the importance of preoedipal attachments have been developed in object relations theory, chiefly in the work by D. W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (New York, 1965); and Melanie Klein, whose work has been collected by Juliet Mitchell, The Selected Works of Melanie Klein (London, 1986). See also n. 6. 22. According to Jane Flax, Freud's narrative of Oedipus displaces maternal power: Freud "displaces and lessens preoedipal fears of annihilation and the self by transforming them into oedipal ones (castration). He evades the centrality of the preoedipal mother-child relationship by insisting that the oedipal struggle is the crucial event in the life history of an individual and culture as a whole. He discounts the possibility of any real relationship between self and m/other by positing primary narcissism as the original human state and the infant as a drive-governed organism rather than an object-seeking one" (Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West [Berkeley, 1990], p. 18; see also ch. 4, "Lacan and Winnicott"). For discussions of object relations and feminist theory, see also Madelon Sprengnether, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, 1990); Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (New York, 1989), pp. 34-87; and for a discussion of object relations as a challenge to the Freudian structures of visual fantasy as argued in film theory, see Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New York,

1994), esp. pp. 228-30. 23. Cited in Belting, The Image and Its Public, p. 57. 24. Sarah Stanbury, "The Virgin's Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion," PMLA, 106 (1991), 1083-93. 25. Middle English Lyrics, ed. Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman (New York, 1974), no. 226; hereafter cited in text. 26. A "Salve Regina," this translates "illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte." 27. Carleton Brown, Religious Lyrics of the 14th Century, rev. ed. G. V. Smithers (1954; Oxford, 1924), no. 4. 28. See Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 157. A similar schema, for instance, can be seen in the Crucifixion page in the thirteenth-century Evesham Psalter, formally similar to the composition of the Salisbury Psalter of the same date; see Rickert, Painting in Britain, figs. 102-3; and also, at further remove, in a thirteenth-century Westphalian rood from Gotland, as illustrated in Schilller, fig. 480. 29. For a discussion of the influence of Italian forms on Crucifixion scenes north of the Alps, see Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, vol. 2, tr. Janet Seligman (Greenwich, Conn., 1972), p. 156. See also p. 146 for a discussion of the three-figured Passion on the rood screen at Naumburg Cathedral. 30. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 157, figs. 54-55. 31. For a discussion of the Thornham Parva Retable, see Christopher Norton, David Park, and Paul Binski, Dominican Painting in East Anglia: The Thornham Parva Retable and the Muse de Cluny Frontal (Wolfeboro, N.J., 1987); for the Westminster wall painting, see Norton et al., p. 68, fig. 101; the Brent Eleigh Crucifixion is reproduced in Norton et al., fig. 114, as is the De Lisle Psalter (British Library MS. Arundel 83ii, fol. 132 4), fig. 102; for the Salisbury (All Souls College, Oxford, MS. Lat. 6, fol. 5) and Evesham (British Museum, MS. Additional 44874, fol. 6) Psalters, see Rickert, Painting in Britian, pp. 116-17, figs. 102-3. 32. It is difficult to ascertain completely the direction of her gaze, since her eyes may have been damaged and some parts of the image have been retouched and rewaxed; see Dominican Painting in East Anglia, p. 23, n. 28. 33. See Dominican Painting in East Anglia, fig. 101. 34. Later 1330s; London, British Library, MS Arundel 83ii, fol. 132; see Dominican Painting in East Anglia, fig. 102; see also Rickert, Painting in Britain, pp. 147-48. 35. Before 1278; London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 368; see Peter Lasko and N. J. Morgan, Medieval Art in East Anglia (Norwich, Eng., 1973), fig. 1. 36. Both circa mid-thirteenth century; see Rickert, Painting in Britain, figs. 102-3. 37. For an example of the crowded Crucifixion scene, see for instance the Crucifixion page in Lytlyngton Missal (c. 1381-84; London, Westminster Abbey Library, fol. 157v.) as discussed by Rickert, Painting in Britian, p. 173. 38. The Crucifixion panel from the retable from St. Michael-at-Plea, c. 1380-1400 (now in Norwich Cathedral) suggests some of the emergent Ricardian emphases on emotional and visual engagement; the Virgin looks up, with an expression of pain and capture, at the body

on the cross. Lasko and Morgan, Medieval Art in East Anglia 1300-1520, pp. 39-40. 39. See Appendix F in E. W. Tristram, English Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century (London, 1955), p. 297. 40. Dominican Painting in East Anglia, p. 34. 41. G. G. Coulton, A Medieval Garner: Human Documents from Four Centuries Preceding the Reformation (London, 1910), pp. 522-23, a translation of E. A. Bond, Chronica Monasterii de Melsa, Rolls Series 43, 3 vols. (London, 1866-81), p. xi. Cited in Camille, Gothic Idol, p. 212. 42. A sense that certain devotional images were only appropriate in certain spaces is indicated by a late fourteenth-century correspondence between Italian artist Dominico di Cambio and a merchant over the appropriate devotional object for a bed chamber. The artist suggests that the appropriate image and the "piu divota chosa" is a pieta--notably not a Crucifixion but a new and highly intimate and emotional form; see R. Piatolloi, "Un mercante del Trecento e gli artisti del tempo suo," Revista d'Arte, 11 (1930), pp. 228ff.; as cited in Belting, The Image and Its Public, pp. 26, 232n. 43. Joan Evans, English Art 1307-1461 (Oxford, 1949), p. 93; hereafter cited in text. 44. For discussions of the Despencer Retable, see Lasko and Morgan, Medieval Art in East Anglia 1300-1520, 36-37; Age of Chivalry (Exhibition Catalogue), ed. Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London, 1987), p. 516; Rickert, Painting in Britain, pp. 176-77; Evans, English Art 1307-1461, p. 96; Beckwith, Christ's Body, p. 23; and for detailed discussion, W. H. St. John Hope, "On a Painted Table or Reredos of the Fourteenth Century, in the Cathedral Church of Norwich," Norfolk Archaeology, 13 (1898), 292-314. 45. This speculation appears to have originated with Hope, "On a Painted Table," 302. 46. For a succinct overview of the conflict over images in the 1380s, see Nicholas Watson, "The Composition of Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love," Speculum, 68 (1993), 662-65. 47. Rickert, Painting in Britain, p. 176. 48. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967; rpt. Detroit, 1983), p. 3. Recent studies of performance have looked at the ways in which the spectacle controls the one who watches; see for instance the study of dance by Randy Martin, Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self (New York, 1990): "Within our society, the mind is the thing that watches but also that which is watched. The body neither sees nor is seen. It has become the action itself. As with the actor on the stage, the body, as a site of resistance, exists only in performance" (p. 2). 49. For various takes on the commodification of the female body, or more precisely the definition of the female body through commodity systems, see Luce Irigaray, "Women on the Market," in This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 170-91, and the similar argument in Gayle Rubin's analysis of the exchange of women, "The Traffic in Women," in Rayna M. Reiter, Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975); Judith Williamson, "Woman is an Island: Femininity and Colonization," in Studies in Entertainment, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), pp. 99-117, who argues that women and femininity in particular function as ideological "dumping grounds" for threatening social values; and Sandra Lee Bartky, "Foucault, Feminity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power," in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston, 1988), pp. 63-82. 50. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 111.

51. In a rich and suggestive critique of the ideology of the visible, Peggy Phelan points out the deceived and faulty logic in the efforts of progressive cultural activists at making racial, ethnic, and gendered "others" visible: "Visibility is a trap . . . it summons surveillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession" (Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance [New York, 1993], pp. 6-7); hereafter cited in text as U. 52. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 191-92; see discussion in Pollock, "Feminism/Foucault," pp. 36-38. 53. The challenge that the spectacle of Christ's body, particularly in its incorporation in the Host, poses to historical interpretation of sexed identities in the Middle Ages has perhaps been forcefully outlined by Kathleen Biddick in her article, "Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible," Speculum, 68 (1993), 410, where she adopts a performative model of gender and poses that the medieval imaging of Christ, and of the Host in particular, existed not as reaction-formation to a fixed and gendered, and especially maternal sense of embodiment, but as a site of play--a site of otherness on which gender as performance could even be constructed. Pointing to specific instances in late fifteenthcentury Germany and the Netherlands, Biddick argues that Christ's body as Host came to define political categories and social identities, in the sense that those to whom the host was made visible in the mass--those that were entitled to cannibalize a body that, in its complex otherness, defined a hegemonic identity--took as a founding term of identity not gender but Christendom. A challenge to see the Otherness of medieval ideas of bodiliness and of bodily disorder is also posed by Miri Rubin, "The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily Order," in Framing Medieval Bodies, pp. 100-22. 54. For an argument that Griselda becomes visible in translation with Walter's annexation of the commons to the court, see the important essay by David Wallace, "When She Translated Was: A Chaucerian Critique of the Petrarchan Academy," in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain 1380-1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 193-94, 203; Wallace is concerned with visibility as a public recognition of virtue, and not with the relationship between visibility and embodiment. 55. See Kathryn Lynch's argument that Walter's investigative impulse reflects Chaucer's (and Petrarch's) fascination with the problematics of curiosity and of late medieval discourse on the limits and ends of knowledge (Kathryn Lynch, "Despoiling Griselda: Chaucer's Walter and the Problem of Knowledge in The Clerk's Tale," Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 10 [1988], 41-70). 56. See Wallace, "When She Translated Was," p. 197. 57. I am indebted for consideration of Griselda's role in the development of a "discourse of domesticity" to the paper by Larry Scanlon, "The Clerk, the Poet, the Wife, her Tale: The Discourse of Domesticity," at the MLA Convention in Washington, D.C., December 1996.