A Human Nugget: The Potentiality of Women's Bodies in Medieval Times through The King of Tars and Two-Egg Theory

In the tale of The King of Tars, a Christian woman and a Pagan sultan are wed and produce a monstrous child: limbless, a round of flesh with no blood or bone, no eyes or nose or other facial features, and stone cold dead. While the tale goes on (spoiler alert: converting to Christianity fixes everything), viewing the scene of the child's birth and existence alongside classical and medieval thought on the potentiality of women's bodies can, in a way, explain everything. A major feature in Aristotle's thinking of conception and women's bodies is that a child's creation required man's sperm, the uniqueness and provider of a soul, with the mother acting as a passive vessel. A woman's body in this Aristotelian concept is additionally the provider of a physical potentiality of a child -- which is a logical jump because a period is a (failed) potentiality to create life. Because this potentiality alone cannot produce a life, a period exists; but add semen to the mix, and poof! Automagically a baby is born (or so says medieval thought). However, Aristotle is not the only philosopher whose contributions make it into The King of Tars -- this is where Galen and his Two-Seed Theory comes into play. Two-Seed Theory is essentially assuming that a man's seed (sperm) and a woman's seed (ovum) fight a battle of epic proportions, and whichever emerges victorious is the parent whom the child shares its appearance. With a combination of Aristotle's view that woman is simply a physical matter-producing vessel, representing only the potential for life, and Galen's idea of the Two-Seed process wherein either parent's appearance could become the child's basic structural pattern, one option is that because a woman is incapable of producing a body with a soul or any unique features they are blessed with a human version of a chicken nugget. Granted, this not only would support Aristotle's idea of woman being unable to create life, but also follow many other medieval beliefs about where the blame of an imperfect baby stems from: the mother. In our previous text on the Man of Law's Tale we discussed that the state of an imperfect child is considered entirely the fault of the mother in medieval thought, due to either the moisture level of the womb, the temperature, the (im)purity of the mother's thoughts, or any number of reasons. One argument that could be made is that because the mother is naturally flawed, even if she has the correct moisture, temperature, and pure thoughts, she still produces offspring with a major deformity because her "seed" was victorious in Galen's understanding, but was unable to produce a normal infant because such a seed is only a potentiality without the aid of a man's sperm in Aristotle's understanding.

Of course, as the main character is a Christian woman, everyone else needs to just convert to Christianity and everyone will live in a magic fairytale land, happily ever after. Jesus will shed tears of rainbows and bless the nugget as the king of all nuggets, dubbed Nugget McDonald, ruler of McDonald Land.
                        

Nugget army of King Nugget McDonald

The Pedestal Woman: The Man of Law's Custance and Nakaba Suzuki's Elizabeth

The two generalized bounds that women have been frequently categorized into within the context of medieval literature -- especially in the 20th century before the upsurge of women's medieval studies of the 1970s and 1980s -- are the "Pedestal" woman of purity and beauty but frequent passivity, and the "Stake" woman associated with wickedness and magic who are frequently active players. Chaucer and his Man of Law tell the tale of Lady Custance, which almost immediately reminded me of heroine Elizabeth Liones from Nakaba Suzuki's "The Seven Deadly Sins". Initially I felt it had to be some shallow level with which I associated them, maybe in their appearance, as they are both said to be pale. Upon further inspection, I found that both fell heavily into the Pedestal half of the dichotomy of women's depictions in story.

Custance

In Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", the Man of Law recounts the tale of Custance, the epitome of Christian purity and female submission. She is a woman of high rank -- the daughter of the emperor -- but without any true power of her own. She is rarely described physically, but when she is, it emphasizes her paleness and light coloring; most of her descriptions focus on her humility, generosity, and other "Christianly traits". Her tale's focus in terms of her experience as a narrative demonstrates a great deal of personal suffering and traveling the path alone. And while the tale is focused on Custance, she is a passive character; when she is at sea, she is simply existing, and when on land events happen to or around her rather than occurring because of her own direct actions -- whether she is being accused of killing a woman, nearly being sexually assaulted in front of her child, or exiled from the homelands of either of her husbands, only God takes action. And men, but who really cares about them? 

Elizabeth

In Nakaba Suzuki's The Seven Deadly Sins, a neo-medieval story written by a Japanese mangaka, the female character of Elizabeth holds many of the same traits that Custance does. Like Custance, she is the daughter of a royal leader but has no direct influence in politics. She is also very pale, with white hair and skin, and blue eyes -- and while her appearance is much clearer due to the media in which she appears, within both the manga and the show her primary characteristics are emphasized to be her kindness, her honesty, and her selflessness. And within the story itself, Elizabeth is introduced as having traveled alone from the capital whilst being pursued by kidnappers and assailants on her family, much as Custance's harrowing sea travels and trials with being assaulted. Despite this very active role pre-story, Elizabeth takes very little action through the rest of the series: other characters (including a few women) take on the tasks of fighting battles, working jobs, and developing their personalities, while Elizabeth is portrayed as a pure-hearted and beautiful young woman, but is time and again unable to take on an active role within the cast.

While a little surprising -- primarily because The Seven Deadly Sins has some major female characters who aren't bound by the dichotomy like Elizabeth is -- in the end I found that it made a lot of sense for Elizabeth and Custance both to be a part of this Pedestal Woman portrayal because over time, the Pedestal Woman has become an archetype. Characters like the damsel in distress and the pure-hearted heroine have become such a prevalent feature of women's representation in storytelling that even now we tend to fall back on it. By no means do I find this satisfying -- I personally detested much of Elizabeth's characterization solely because of her lack of action -- but now that I understand why Elizabeth- and Custance-type exist, I find it makes them more bearable. 

Languishing Latinate: Authorship and Plagiarism in the Encomium Emmae Reginae

     The collective story of Emma of Normandy as told by a nameless monk in the early 11th century discusses at length the influences that the one-time queen/queen regent/political pawn/political player had in the Danish and English monarchies throughout her life. The credence the unnamed monk gives to her legacy is further legitimized by the amount of detail he ascribes to the works of Cnut the Great, Emma's second husband. However, while the retelling of the Danish incursion is detailed with exceptional specificity, a number of the descriptions seem to mimic those of a far older text written by an author equally steeped in the Latinate linguistic tradition: Julius Caesar. Caesar's treatise on the Gallic Wars details a similar incursion into British territory, a strikingly similar storming of a beach, and a near identical success in the face of mounting odds. While it would be a speculative stretch to say that the monk lifted a great amount of his story from a far older work, the similarities make for an interesting instance of intertextuality that may, in fact, have something to say about the credence of Emma as well as her hired author.

     From a narrative standpoint, beginning a great portion of the Encomium with the details of the invasions of the Danes serves to tie Emma in with the glories of conquest, but the fact that the text itself was written specifically to honor Emma makes the half-hearted justification on the part of the monk seem less than genuine (7). Oddly enough, Caesar’s De Bello Gallico takes a similar rhetorical route, noting that the exploits and trumps listed in the work are (primarily) the works of Caesar by proxy, but can be attributed to a large number of consuls, imperators and soldiers. Both works are a attempting to tell the story of a single key player in a vast and complex situation, but this is not the only resemblance the works share.

     In Book II of the Encomium, newly risen King Cnut has assembled a force to invade the British mainland. Caesar, likewise, assembled a seemingly similar force after his successful incursion into Gallic territory (De Bello Gallico, Book IV). Both of the expeditionary assaults are described in detail, with the invading force at first struggling to gain a foothold, and then successfully repelling the defensive force after an extreme effort, adding to the "virtus" of the respective armies. While this could simply be a case of historical similarity, the monk in question is noted to be exceptionally well read in Latinate texts, as is seen in a number of allusions he makes early in his retelling. It could stand to reason that in lieu of more concrete evidence or knowledge as to the legacy of Emma of Normandy and that of her husband, the monk simply pasted a compelling known story onto a more recent historical narrative. The rhetorical reasoning, at the very least, seems to match.

     The question as to why this monk would have seemingly plagiarized remains. One possible explanation could be that there was little that the commissioned monk had to say concerning Emma. After all, the woman herself does not appear in her own work until late in Book II. The earlier stories of Sveinn and Cnut do not appear to be filler or a literary holding pattern to introduce Emma, but rather a focus of the narrative. Whether this chosen narrative order was the result of a lack of material, a kind of androcentric thinking, or a sort of literary micro-aggression remains to be seen.