Seductive violence and three Chaucerian women

College Literature, Spring 2001 by O'Brien, Timothy D

What we have argued so far is that the dream's suggestions of violence and the image of blood make it appealing to any "red-blooded" male. But the violence also targets the particular audience, the clerk Jankyn. Jankyn's education would have subjected him to the grammarian and to the mnemonic techniques that schoolmaster would have enforced. One of these techniques, according to Mary Carruthers, is the use of violent images to fix learning in the memory. As an example of this technique she refers to a passage from Thomas Bradwardine's De memoria artificialis in which he demonstrates a technique for training the mind to arrange images (in this case, of the zodiac) in a location:

Likewise one places a very red bull to the right of the ram, kicking the ram with his rear feet; standing erect, the ram then with his right foot kicks the bull above his large and super-swollen testicles, causing a copious infusion of blood. And by means of the testicles one will recall that it is a bull, not a castrated ox or a cow. In a similar manner, a woman is placed before the bull as though laboring in birth, and from her uterus as though ripped open from the breast are figured coming forth two most beautiful twins, playing with a horrible, intensely red crab, which holds captive the hand of one of the little ones and thus compells him to weeping and to such signs, the remaining child wondering yet nonetheless caressing the crab in a childish way .. .To the left of the ram a dreadful lion is placed, who with open mouth and rearing on its legs attacks a virgin, beautifully adorned, by tearing her ornate garments. With its left foot the ram inflicts a wound to the lion's head. The virgin truly holds in her right hand scales for which might be fashioned a balance-beam of silver with a plumb-line of red silk, and then weighing-pans of gold; on her left is placed a scorpion wondrously fighting her so that her whole left arm is swollen, which [scorpion] she strives to balance in the aforesaid scales. (Carruthers 1990, 283-84)

Like Albertus Magnus (Carruthers 1990, 274, 279) and Geoffrey of Vinsauf (Enders 1996, 34) for instance, Bradwardine emphasizes here the function of the unusual, the startling, and the violent image in the discipline of memory. Images of violence are certainly not the only memory devices and indeed all images of violence as means of fixing learning in the memory are not directed as clearly as they are in this passage toward women. However, such emphasis on the arresting image as part of a discipline into which young males were indoctrinated, along with the fact that lessons in grammar, logic, and rhetoric were reinforced with violence or the threat of it, established a mechanism by which females were positioned as the objects of violence. Medieval schoolmasters staged learning as a process controlled by "good" violence, as a shared experience among males, memorialized by the violence of the lash. Though males, not females, were the objects of this schoolmaster's violence, the doctrine that this violence was part of a disciplining of boys into men made effeminacy its object. The rod or the switch targeted all that was associated with women: lack of discipline and a weak or sinister memory. As Jody Enders explains in her examination of the violent underpinnings of medieval rhetoric, the aim of the master, as depicted, for example, in Thomas Murner's woodcut illustration of the master with the switch, was to beat the softness, the female elements, out of the youth under his charge (1996,39). As Enders explains, "this is a complex epistemological move according to which softness is cast as feminine-and then beaten out of men at the same time that masculinity is beaten in" (1996, 42).Though their bodies are at one time the target of such attacks, the schoolboys later become the disciplinarians who target the youths of another generation. Always the legitimizing target of such violence is the undifferentiated and unorganized. Like the violence of bodily discipline, the systematization of memory also opposes what was unformed and fluid (what was female) about the human memory in the first place (Carruthers 1990,7). For the males these violent techniques enable disciplined, grammatical speech.Violence toward women, however, functions to silence and ultimately to sexualize them (Enders 1996, 42).