SOURCE: Marchalonis, Shirley. “Medieval Symbols and the Gesta Romanorum.” The Chaucer Review 8, no.4 (spring 1974): 311-19.

[In the following essay, Marchalonis argues that symbolism in the Gesta Romanorum stories is externally imposed rather than internally developed.]

Since the theories of D. W. Robertson, Jr., were first proposed, their validity has been the subject of much scholarly discussion.¹ It seems unlikely that any more can be said about Robertson's ideas in general statements; what is needed now are systematic and painstaking attempts to apply the theories to specific works of medieval literature. In this paper I would like to examine Robertson's ideas about the use of symbols in connection with the Gesta Romanorum.

Robertson's method implies the existence of a fairly consistent set of symbols, not necessarily immediately identifiable, but possible to define at some level. A difficulty arises, however, from the fact that even symbols possessing multiple meanings must have some limitations if they are to be of any use as leads into the hidden meaning of a literary work. If the method of Biblical interpretation recommended by Augustine, which is the basis of Robertson's theory, is strictly followed, then the work itself can be expected to provide the clues.²

The use and definition of symbols is nowhere more obvious in medieval literature than in the collection of tales known as the Gesta Romanorum.³ The enormous popularity of the work as entertainment, instruction, and source indicates the necessity of considering it in any broad examination of medieval writing. It may be argued that the contents of the Gesta are hardly great, or even good, literature. The fact is undeniable; nevertheless, the tale-application pattern that dominates the collection does overtly what the exegetes say medieval literature does covertly: it presents a story which is then reinterpreted by assigning definite meanings to characters or things.

Because of its form, and because it occupies a place midway between the popular story and the writings of the Fathers, the expectation that here, if anywhere, consistent use of symbols will be found seems justified. The collection is, of course, avowedly didactic, yet some of the tales are not “moral” in themselves but are made so by the addition of the application. More often, when the tale has an intrinsic moral, as in exemplum or saint's life, the application changes the original meaning, often providing a theological interpretation for a story that already has a moral or ethical meaning.

The form of most of the applications is an equation in which a character or thing is said to equal something else. Here is a typical example:

Beloved, that king is the heavenly father; the son … is our lord Jesus Christ; the bride is the beautiful soul created in the likeness of God, the four sisters justice, truth, mercy and peace. The soul has committed adultery with the servant of the lord, i.e. the devil, since she consented to him, and, therefore, her lord sent her away.

(LV)

The application then becomes a sermon enlarging on the idea of the corrupted soul, its punishment and redemption. While most of the applications function as keys to a one-to-one allegorical relationship, a smaller number are simply loose reinterpretations of the tale.

Out of the one hundred eighty-one tales that comprise the Gesta, one hundred eighteen begin with the establishment of an authority who may be a king, emperor, knight, or figure from history. Although he may or may not be an active character in the story, he does function with consistency: he is always the ruler. The ruler, then, is the most constant symbol; if the tales are allegory, and an allegory that could be discovered by their readers or hearers, it is logical to expect consistent meaning in this very important set of symbols. The obvious assumption that the ruler stands for God or Christ is correct in eighty-two of the applications; however, in one tale the ruler is identified as the human soul (X), in seven he [is] any good Christian (XI, XVI, XLVII, LVI, LXV, CIII, CLXXVII), in four he is any Christian prelate (XVIII, CXXII, CXLVI, CLXXIV), in two he is a man of pride or vanity (XLIV, LIX), and in five of the tales he is identified as the devil (VI, XLIX, LXXXII, XCI).⁴

Such variety and range of meaning cause some doubt about the correctness of the assumption that the medieval audience would be prepared with a set of symbolic interpretations that would enable it to work out the hidden meanings in the text. What is suggested instead is that the need to instruct led a small group who were conscious of the possibilities of allegory and symbolic interpretation to use popular stories for their own didactic purposes. Thus in many of the tales and applications there is an air of contrivance. For example:

OF JUDGMENT AGAINST ADULTERERS

There was a certain knight who had a beautiful castle, above which two storks were nesting; below there was a clear fountain in which the storks were accustomed to bathe themselves. It happened that the female brought forth young; the male indeed kept flying throughout the land, in order to gather food for the young. While he was gone, the female committed adultery, but before the male came back, she had gone down to the fountain to wash herself lest the male notice the stench of adultery. The knight, when he had seen this rather often, marveled, closed the fountain lest the stork wash herself or bathe; she, when indeed she had seen the closed fountain and was not able to bathe, returned to her nest after committing adultery. The male, coming and sensing the stench of adultery, flew from there and within twenty-four hours brought with him a multitude of storks and they killed her in the presence of the knight.

(LXXXII)

This seems to be a fairly straightforward story, concerned with sin and its punishment. We could assume that the ruler is God because of the prevalence of that symbolic meaning; our tale would then be of an omniscient diety using the male stork as the agent of punishment for the sin of adultery. But here is the application:

Beloved, those two storks are Christ and the soul. The soul is the bride of Christ and as often as it has committed adultery through sinning, it runs to the fountain of confession that it may be cleansed, lest Christ her spouse sense the stench of adultery. The knight who closed the fountain is the devil, who hardens the heart of man, who always strives to hinder man, lest he run to the fountain of confession and lest he confess.⁵

The application presents several surprises. Not only does the ruler turn out to be the devil rather than God, but the meaning of the whole tale has shifted, becoming theological rather than moral. Even the presence of the fountain does not give a clue to the interpretation, for although it is usually associated with the washing away of sin (which in this tale could only be hypocrisy, since the washing hides rather than obliterates the sin), in another of these tales (LIV) the fountain is identified as the world.

The second meaning, that hidden meaning for which people would search, is not indicated by any consistent set of symbols which would act as a clue, and therefore could hardly be understood without the explanation given in the application. This fact becomes even clearer when the tale is compared with a similar one:

OF ADULTERY

It is said that a certain king had a lion, a lioness and a leopard, which he loved very much. But when the lion was absent the lioness committed adultery with the leopard. That the lion might not sense the stench of adultery in her, she was accustomed to bathe in a fountain near the castle of the king. The king, since indeed he had seen this rather often, on a certain occasion when the lioness had committted adultery, ordered her fountain to be closed. The lion coming and sensing the stench of adultery, in the presence of all killed her, as if he were a judge through a wide decree.

APPLICATION

That king is the heavenly father; the lion is our lord Jesus Christ, that is, the lion of the tribe of Judah; but the lioness is the soul of man, which often commits adultery with the leopard, i.e. the devil. When she has committed adultery she runs to confession and is saved; but if she descends without confession and repentance she cannot escape the punishment of the lion, but he will condemn her through a just sentence. …⁶

(CLXXXI)

Perhaps the most startling observation to emerge from the comparison is that both God and the devil behave in exactly the same manner, shutting off all possibility of redemption from the sinner. Since the same symbol represents both God and devil, it is difficult to see how the reader would be able to grasp its theological import, although the moral of the tale itself is perfectly clear.

Brief examination of other tales reveals further inconsistencies; although they are not of the same kind, they emphasize the fact that no standard set of correspondences exists here, and they deepen the sense of contrivance in the relationship of a tale to its application. Tale CX, a saint's life, is the story of the conversion of Placidus (St. Eustace), who follows a stag deep into the forest until he is separated from the rest of the hunt. The stag then faces him and says, “Why dost thou persecute me, Placidus? For thy sake have I assumed the shape of this animal: I am Christ whom thou ignorantly worshippest.” In spite of this very clear self-identification, the application defines the stag as reason. In CXXVII, an exemplum whose message is the inability of man to understand the ways of God, the angel who explains to the bewildered and rebellious hermit the meaning of the injustices he has witnessed briefly mentions a poor man who found some money and, after a search for its owner, used it for himself and his family. Surprisingly, the application identifies this very minor figure as Christ. In one application a priest is identified as Christ, but there is no priest in the tale (LXI); another (CLXXI) has an application beginning with the familiar “My beloved, the emperor is God,” in spite of the fact that there is no emperor mentioned in the tale.

What seems to be happening in these and similar tales is the distortion of the narrative for the purpose of providing a base for allegory; the “narrative … furnishes the material base or outlines and the interpretation determines the primary form of the discourse and its details.”⁷ Here the result lacks coherence; in few of the tales is there a one-to one allegory that is capable of being understood without direction.

OF THE CAUSE OF THE FALL OF TROY

Ovid tells about the Trojan War that Helen was seized by Paris and that it was foretold that the Trojan city would not be conquered until Achilles was dead. His mother hearing this hid him in the chamber of the servant girls of a certain king, in the dress of a woman. Understanding this, Ulysses prepared a ship with goods to sell, placing in it (both) female ornaments and shining arms, and thus came to the castle where Achilles was staying shut in with the servant girls; when he saw the ship with the ornaments and arms he entered with the girls to buy the goods; but when Ulysses had handled the arms curiously and had instigated him to touch them, Achilles snatched up a spear and brandished it and thus the matter was disclosed. When Ulysses took him and led him to Troy they were victorious. Indeed when Achilles had died Troy was seized and the hostages of the opposite side were freed.

APPLICATION

Beloved, Paris signifies the devil, Helen indeed the soul or the whole human race, captured by the devil, Troy is hell, Ulysses is Christ, Achilles the Holy Ghost; the ship laden with merchandise is the Blessed Virgin Mary adorned with virtues; the arms of Ulysses are the cross, keys, lance, crown, etc. Before the death of Christ, Troy, i.e. hell, prevailed and held the ancient fathers hostage, but Christ in truth having died on Good Friday, the devil was seized and he returned the hostages he held.

(CLVI)

This is an example of what I have called earlier a reinterpretation of the tale. Presumably someone trying to find the hidden meaning here would turn to the narrative for guidance, but the action of the tale is helpful only to a point. The idea of the devil carrying off the soul, or mankind, to hell is familiar enough; however, by the interpretation given, Christ becomes a trickster ferreting out a reluctant Holy Ghost. Christ, the sacrifice, is represented not by Achilles, who must die in order that Troy may be conquered, but by Ulysses; a logical and coherent correspondence is missed and instead there is an assignment of meanings that is confusing even with the application.

This kind of arbitrary and illogical superimposition of a moral on material whose original shaping does not accommodate that particular message reinforces the suspicion that where secondary meanings are intended, they are explained. There are, indeed, tales in which the explanation is the only thing that gives any coherence to the tale. Tale LXII is one of these: an emperor wants to see Florentina, a woman so beautiful that wars were fought over her, but she dies before she is brought to his presence. He summons an artist who is ordered to paint her picture, a task he accomplishes by using as models four beautiful women. The emperor comments that Florentina should have loved the artist for portraying her beauty. Only with the application is any kind of resolution possible; then Florentina becomes the human soul, the painter Christ, and there is some point in the tale. This kind of practice suggests strongly that the tale was contrived to fit the application.

I should like to consider one more set of symbols nearly as numerous as those representing the ruler. These are the animal symbols. Since medieval bestiaries not only described animals but attributed significance to them, here, if anywhere, we might expect to find exhibited some degree of consistency.⁸ The lion, for example, usually represents Christ in the bestiaries. Identification of the lion as Christ occurs in two of the tales (CXIX, CLXXXI): in Tale CIV, a close retelling of the Androcles and the lion fable, in which it might be expected that the lion, served by man and then saving him, is certain to represent Christ, the application identifies the lion as the human race, the knight who removes the thorn as the world, and the thorn “original sin drawn out by baptism.” Frustration rather than aesthetic pleasure is apt to be the lot of the reader or listener who tries to find the hidden meaning here, since there are no clues in the text that would [point] to this interpretation; in fact, everything in the tale leads away from it.

Further contradicting the usual meaning of the lion as given in the bestaries, Tales LXIII and CX identify him as the devil. Tale LXIII, obviously based on folk-tales, is a strange mixture; its “heroine” is named the “Lady of Comfort,” a name which points clearly toward allegory; it involves a marriage test, and it contains echoes of the stories of Jason and Medea (the method of overcoming the lion) and Theseus and Ariadne (the ball of thread). The secondary meaning is easy enough to find in this story, since the Lady of Comfort is a fairly obvious clue. Tale CX is more complicated. This is the story of Placidus, mentioned above; it is one of the longest tales in the collection, running to more than eight pages, and is full of action. After he is converted, Placidus is told that he will have to endure a number of trials that the devil is preparing for him. These trials begin at once; they include pestilence and robbery, by which he loses all his property, flight from his home, the abduction of his wife and finally the loss of his two sons, carried off by a lion and a wolf respectively.⁹ All of these trials are presented in one long paragraph; obviously the desired effect is simply the piling up of torments to demonstrate the strength of the hero's faith. Yet the application singles out the lion and makes him the devil, even though the tale itself makes it clear that the lion is merely one tribulation among the many sent by the devil. An even odder discrepancy occurs when the ship's captain, who takes the hero's wife and sets him and his two sons adrift, is identified as “a prelate, who would detain the soul from error,” a definition that makes no sense at all in connection with the captain's actions in the story.

Serpents, whose traditional associations with the devil and with evil are manifold and certainly would have been well known, do indeed represent the devil in several tales (XXXVII, CXIV, CLXXIV, CLXXVI), in all of which their significance is clear and provides an easy clue to the meaning of the tale. In Tale XCIX, however, the serpent represents man, and in CV and CXIX a prelate or confessor; here all three roles represent “good” rather than “evil.” In Tale CXLI, “the serpent in the chamber signifies Christ retained in the human breast, by virtue of baptism.” The identification is made doubly odd since this tale is indeed capable of being read as a retelling of the story of the fall; a knight on the advice of his wife tries to kill the serpent who has given him gifts. The knight is identified with Adam. Representing Christ by a serpent is illogical in light of the prototype; furthermore, such an identification might serve to lead the reader away from the desired hidden meaning of the tale.

Fish, a well-known symbol for the followers of Christ, occur in one tale (LXXXV) where they are identified as sinners. Horses have a variety of meanings: the body (LXV, LXXV), a sinner (LXX, CLXIII), the heart of St. Bernard (CLXX), the merits of martyrs and saints (CLXXX) and, as four white horses, the four Evangelists (XXX). Dogs are equally interesting; although most often compared to priests or preachers (II, XII, LXXIX, CXXIV, CXXVII), they also represent conscience (I), carnal affections (XXVII), hope of long life, which leads to sin (XXVIII), soul and body (CXXXIII), the flesh (LIX) and vices (CXLII).

It may be interesting to reverse the perspective and look from the meaning to the symbol. So common a concept as the world appears often in the Gesta tales. However, there is little consistency in the concrete terms used to represent the world: a father who would not ransom his son (V), the Emperor's (God's) kingdom and meadows (XII), mother (XV, CXXIII, CXXVI), the sea (XVII), a magician (XXIV), a garden (LXIII), the wayside (LXVI), one of three dukes (LXXV), Rosamunda, a beautiful princess (LXXVII), water (LXXV), a fountain (XCIV), an old man (CIII), a knight (CIV), a cake of earth (CIX), a wood (CXIV, CLXXIV), a factor (agent) (CXVIII), a false friend (CXXIX), an evil physician (CXXXII), a besieged city (CXXXIV), a forest (CXLII, CLXI), a university (CLI), a castle (CLV, CLX), a city (CLVII), a miller's house (CLXIII) a pit (CLXIX), a mountain (CLXXII), Hungary (CLXXX).

The range here is too broad to suggest any set or pattern of consistent symbols for the concept of the world, although some, such as a city, would be familiar enough. Forest, wood and grove might seem to approach a pattern of symbols for the world except that in the romance literature they indicate the supernatural or the other world.

The examples given here, together with many others not discussed in this paper, show that the method used in creating a didactic interpretation from each tale does not depend on a consistent set of symbols, since no such thing exists within the work. In fact, in one sense what I have been calling symbols are not symbols at all. Clearly most of the tales existed before the applications; the identifications are superimposed without much concern for logic or what a later age would call decorum. Those who added the applications seem to have done so chiefly to provide a set of terms from which the sermon might be developed rather than to work out a second level of meaning from the tale itself. Regardless of the size of his hypothetical symbol-hoard, it is difficult to imagine how the medieval reader or listener could arrive at the desired meaning without the application to each tale; if he could do so there would be no need for the application.

If this conclusion is valid, then the Augustinian method of Biblical exegesis, depending as it does on clues found within the work, cannot possibly apply to the Gesta Romanorum. Considering the popularity of the Gesta and its obvious didactic purpose, the failure of Augustine's method here casts doubt upon the usefulness of that method as a means of understanding other kinds of medieval literature and underlines the necessity of remembering, as E. Talbot Donaldson points out, that Augustine's method was directed to understanding and explaining the Bible, not medieval literature in general.¹⁰

Notes

1. Robertson's theories are competently summarized by A. Leigh Deneef, “Robertson and the Critics,” ChauR. [Chaucer Review], 2 (1968), 205-34. A complete bibliography of Robertson's writings is included in the article. Perhaps the most important of these are “Historical Criticism,” English Institute Essays 1950, ed. Alan S. Downer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962) and “The Doctrine of Charity in Medieval Literary Gardens: A Topical Approach Through Symbolism and Allegory,” Speculum, 26 (1951), 24-49; the latter is perhaps most pertinent to this paper. For some comments see Francis Lee Utley, “Robertsonianism Redivivius,” RPH [Romance Philosophy and History], 19 (1965), 250-60, and the collection Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature, ed. Dorothy Bethurum (New York: Dover Press, 1959), which contains arguments for and against Robertson's thesis notably R. E. Kaske, “Patristic Exegesis: The Defense” and E. Talbot Donaldson, “Patristic Exegesis: The Opposition.”

2. Donaldson, discussing this point, refers to the passage in Piers Plowman “when the dreamer meets someone called Abraham representing faith, the first thing that Abraham says is ‘I am faith!’” (p 16). Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958).

3. Gesta Romanorum, ed. Hermann Oesterley (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagbuchhandlung, 1963); Gesta Romanorum, ed. Charles Swan and Wynnard Hooper (New York: Dover Press, 1959); Gesta Romanorum, ed. Sidney J. H. Herrtage, EETS [Early English Text Society] 33 (London: N. Trübner, 1897). I have consulted all three texts in preparing this paper; citations are to the Oesterley edition in translations made by Professor Clara Thoman, of Slippery Rock State College, to whom I should like to express my gratitude. It is unfortunate that the most accessible of these editions, that of Swan and Hooper, is inadequate for any serious study of the Gesta, since the editors shortened and changed the material, particularly in the applications, to suit their moral and religious attitudes. Information about the history comes from the Introduction to Swan and Hooper and to the Anglo-Latin Gesta.

4. In one tale (CLXXI) the emperor appears only in the application.

5. I have omitted the final paragraph which concerns the importance of confession.

6. The final lines deal with the sentence of sinners and praise of God.

7. Theodore Silverstein, “Allegory and Literary Form,” PMLA, 82 (1967), 30.

8. T. H. White, The Bestiary (New York: Putnam's, 1954); Colin Clair, Unnatural History (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1967); Ernst and Johanna Lehner, A Fantastic Bestiary (New York: Tudor, 1969).

9. This highly eventful story is also the metrical romance Sir Isumbras.

10. Donaldson, p. 9.