The term ’disciplining’ in my title has a double value: it stands for the construction of rhetoric as an academic discipline, and it also suggests the way that rhetoric’s disciplinary power has always been subject to the most severe kinds of institutional regulation, or ’discipline’. This double sense of discipline is dramatised in the figure of Chaucer’s Pardoner, in the homologous relation of his rhetoric, with its ambiguous content and transgressive morality, and his sexuality, with its bodily ambiguity and its transgression of gender boundaries. The Pardoner’s claims for the disciplinary autonomy of rhetoric are suppressed in the same way that his sexuality is subject to public correction through the Host’s virtual threat of (re)castration. The linkage that I want to explore here between sexuality, disciplining of the body, and the discipline of rhetoric is not something that I have manufactured for the sake of (rhetorical) argument; it is a linkage that is already there in the history of rhetoric itself.

Just as there is no historically transcendent category of the body, so there is also no unitary discursive category of bodiliness. As a symbolic domain the body is the expressive language through which many cultural discourses, including intellectual relations, aesthetics and science, define themselves.1 In this essay I will examine how scientific or disciplinary classification in antiquity and the Middle Ages constitutes one domain or category of the body, and how notions of violent physical correction or ’discipline’ to be enacted on the human body are transferred metaphorically to the realm of intellectual disciplines. This has particular implications for the institutional history of rhetoric; I want to give the disciplinary body of rhetoric a history.2 In locating this historical inquiry at the literary site of Chaucer’s Pardoner I do not pretend here to advance on the innovative and important insights that recent work in feminist and gay theory have brought to Chaucerian texts, especially new readings of the Pardoner’s Tale as a site for the discursive conflicts of gender.3 Rather, what I offer is an attempt to understand how gender and sexuality are part of the political text of rhetoric’s institutional history.

As a science, rhetoric—from antiquity onwards—has been suspect, subject to regulation and control by dominant institutional interests. Ancient and medieval (as well as modern) practitioners and theorists of rhetoric have always to answer to question, first posed by Socrates to Gorgias: ’does rhetoric constitute a legitimate study of its own?’ I want to recast this question in the terms of its most radical implications: ’does rhetoric have a body?’ This is the question to which the disciplinary legitimacy of rhetoric was (and indeed still is) linked; judgement of rhetoric’s disciplinary status is articulated through a discourse about its bodily status.

To begin we can turn for illustration to two modern perspectives on medieval rhetoric, one which denies rhetoric any disciplinary autonomy in the Middle Ages by denying it a body, and one which denies medieval rhetoric a disciplinary legitimacy by giving it a transgressive, fragmented body. The first of these, which denies rhetoric any disciplinary status in history by denying it a body, is well exemplified through a recently published account of an extraordinary professional exchange. James J. Murphy, the foremost modern historian of medieval rhetoric, recounts how in 1960 he sent an article on medieval rhetoric to the journal PMLA. The article was rejected with this response from the reader: ’rhetoric is not a subject; and if it were, there would be no history of it’. Fifteen years later, after the appearance of Murphy’s Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,4 the reviewer was moved to apologise to Murphy and retract that opinion.5 The view that the reviewer first expressed, that rhetoric is no subject itself and has no history of its own, is in metaphorical terms a denial of rhetoric’s body, of its location in space or time; the reviewer’s later admission of ignorance or shortsightedness was itself predicated on the ’embodiment’ of rhetoric’s disciplinary history in Murphy’s substantial volume, a physical codex that the reviewer and others could see and touch as evidence of a body of historical facticity. One other notable example of the model of denying the disciplinary ’body’ of rhetoric is Richard McKeon’s influential article ’Rhetoric in the Middle Ages’,6 which also argues that medieval rhetoric has no history of its own, but can be known to us as the imprint of the many other intellectual (and specifically philosophical) practices with which it was associated. McKeon proposes to write a history of rhetoric that accounts for its multiple, shifting, and ephemeral nature:

Very possibly the reviewer of Murphy’s article (who was not, incidentally, McKeon himself) derived a point of view (as well as wording) from the auctoritas of McKeon’s study. McKeon’s language is virtually that of the body or bodily physics; rhetoric has no ’fixed’ subject matter, nor does it have a ’place’ in classifications of the sciences. Interestingly McKeon’s language also betrays some anxiety about what would happen to the regulation of the sciences under classificatory schemes—a regulation that represents a coercive ’discipline’ or control imposed on the sciences—if rhetoric were to be understood solely through its metamorphic and irregular appearances in those schemes; the entire system would be ’emptied’ of its content and meaning and would no longer yield to our managerial control of its many and various parts. In other words, rhetoric shifts its position so often in medieval classifications of the sciences that it threatens to reduce the whole system to a meaningless jumble; rhetoric is so disruptive a force that it can only be historically and discursively managed, according to McKeon, by denying it a veritable scientific body of its own and treating its appearances in scientific classifications as merely suggestive illusions. The assumption behind this theoretical model that denies rhetoric a body is that rhetoric by its very nature defies the principles of solidity and stability attributed to the body; rhetoric is not substantive, it is not about or of anything, but is only a tool (in the Aristotelian sense of organon) that comes into being through application to other things.

The second modern perspective also challenges rhetoric’s claims to disciplinary legitimacy, but in this case by giving it a body: an unruly, fragmented body that confirms rhetoric’s illegitimacy. This is the view propounded quite explicitly by Brian Vickers in his recent book In Defence of Rhetoric,8 which is argued through an unabashed bias of classical humanism. Vickers’s chapter on the Middle Ages is entitled ’Medieval Fragmentation’: the Middle Ages represent a falling away from rhetoric’s integrity of purpose in antiquity, and are characterised by atrophy, reduction to mere tropology, a loss of the whole aesthetic picture, and a decline of function in favour of an endless pursuit of form. The Middle Ages fragment rhetoric into the repetitive mechanics of abbreviation and amplification. Medieval rhetoric is externally fragmented in that the classical rhetorical texts survive ’in a damaged and haphazard state’; it is internally fragmented in that ’readers atomized what had been transmitted to fit their own needs’ (p. 220). The emergence in the Middle Ages of three specialised arts of rhetoric (poetria, dictamen, and the ars praedicandi) represents a ’dismemberment’ (p. 236) of what had once been (in Vickers’s humanist view) a coherent and homogeneous lore. This view (which Vickers also extends to poststructuralist criticism as a twentieth-century fragmentation of rhetoric) can be seen as a consequence of the logic of the ’bodiless’ model exemplified by McKeon and the PMLA reviewer. Rhetoric’s transmutative heterogeneity makes it incapable of possessing a stable or healthy body; but those institutional interests that abhor a vacuum and that would manage that instability can nevertheless assign rhetoric a body, a body that symbolically confirms and justifies that imposition of coercive management. In the interests of institutional discipline rhetoric is given a body, a transgressive, atrophied or fragmented, illegitimate body that by its very nature invites corrective regulation. In the limited case of Vickers’s book, the long-range project of institutional management of rhetoric is the moralised chronology that he aims to produce; here, operating in the same symbolic sphere of language that (as we will see) Quintilian also uses, Vickers invents a bodily image for rhetoric in order to discriminate between his ideal models of rhetoric (classical and Renaissance) and its fallen forms (medieval and modern). Thus the real purpose of giving rhetoric a body is to identify the transgressive tendencies of rhetoric when it is unguarded or unregulated (as Vickers believes it was during the Middle Ages), and to enclose it within a managerial paradigm of organic stability which can monitor its propensity for resistance.

These two modern perspectives on medieval rhetoric are very close to views of rhetoric that were propounded in antiquity and especially in the Middle Ages. In their views of medieval rhetoric, Vickers and McKeon actually voice the terms of censure that were used in the Middle Ages to vilify and marginalise rhetoric; indeed, their view of the Middle Ages is produced by the Middle Ages themselves, and through the institutional power of their voices is continually reproduced. In the metaphorical language about rhetoric from antiquity to the Middle Ages we see an opposition between a bodiless and an embodied rhetoric. These contradictory models reveal the enormous ideological stakes in this metaphorical discourse. Rhetoric by its very nature defies the principles that attached to ideas of the integrated body and, by extension, to ideas of a disciplinary body of knowledge. As I will argue here, rhetoric for this very reason had to come under some institutional and discursive regulation, and so a ’body’ had to be invented for rhetoric to allow it to be ’disciplined’. The body invented for rhetoric was a transgressive, unlicensed body that would justify the severest regulation or discipline.

The relationship between scientific disciplinarity and the body as an object of punishment or discipline emerges in the history of the Latin word disciplina, which constitutes the larger framework for my investigation here. The extraordinary history of this word has been documented by Henri Marrou, to whose philological research my account here is indebted.9 Disciplina is related to discere, ’to learn’, although in classical usage it can also mean ’teaching’, as in the teachings of a master. In classical antiquity, the broadest meaning of disciplina (in the plural) is intellectual culture or scientific knowledge. These meanings passed into patristic and early medieval use. Here we find the application of the word still familiar to moderns; disciplina designates a particular science, such as rhetoric, dialectic, astronomy, geometry, or music.10 In the plural it designates all the various sciences together as a group.11 Other words that are used synonymously with disciplina in this sense, sometimes with slightly different emphases, are doctrina (for which Marrou finds a more general and abstract connotation, the broader sense of study, intellectual work, or knowledge), ars (which early on was the preferred term for the elements of the trivium), and scientia.12

Thus in this application, disciplina is a particular body of knowledge. In signifying an individual branch of knowledge, it is a term for differentiating between kinds of scientific discourse and for delimiting and containing each branch of knowledge according to the rules that pertain to (or inhere within) a given discipline.13 What disciplina really signifies is a set of rules which impose order. Here the rich semantic field of the word disciplina comes into play, for it has a much wider range of meaning than its synonyms, including doctrina. In classical use, disciplina is the Latin equivalent of the Greek paideia, acquiring the sense of rules imposed by a master on a student, especially moral rules aimed at the conduct of one’s life. In this respect ancient usage is very informative. In classical Latin, disciplina is applied to military life, to designate the rules and principles that are used to maintain order, in other words, military discipline.14 From this we need not look far to find the word used to designate the imposition of rules or order in the civil domain. Cicero speaks of ’disciplina civitatis’, and Tacitus speaks of the ’most severe discipline and laws’ of Sparta and Crete.15

These various senses of disciplina were carried over into early Christian use. The practical, moral orientation of disciplina finds expression in the idea of a rule of Christian life: for Augustine, Christian discipline is the ’law of God’, the wisdom and knowledge that constitute a rule of Christian living.16 Disciplina is also the rule imposed by the Church on believers, and later by ecclesiastical authority on clergy. Along these lines we arrive at the notion of monastic discipline, the order and submission to authority that are required by observance of the rule within the monastic community.17 Thus the discipline of civil law becomes the self-regulation of an enclosed religious community.

Finally, there is one meaning of disciplina unknown in classical usage, a meaning introduced in the language of the Septuagint and the New Testament: punishment, correction, pain inflicted for a transgression. Of course, ancient pedagogical practice involved corporal punishment, but the terms paideia in Greek and disciplina in Latin were not used to signify this aspect of instructive correction (even though corporal punishment would be understood as part of the educative system denoted by these terms).18 In the Greek and Latin scriptures, however, the terms were extended to include this sense, taking on, moreover, the idea of the punishment that God reserves for correction of the sinner.19 In the language of the Church Fathers, the punitive connotation of disciplina is associated with an educative function, corporal punishment as deterrent or correction. Here the term disciplina becomes linked with verberare, ’to flog’, and with vapulare, ’to get a beating’.20 The term inevitably acquires civil and legal dimensions: physical punishment by secular authority; the power to inflict punishment; and punitive law itself.21 Out of its association with flogging and beating it also takes on the specialised meaning of flagellation, both in the sense of punishment under law and of self-inflicted scourging.22 Thus by the early Middle Ages the idea of intellectual regulation, of observing a rule or scientific order, is identified semantically with the idea of physical punishment, disciplina corporis, disciplining of the body to correct or guard against vice, whether imposed by parent, teacher, monastic rule, civil law, or self.

From disciplina as a metaphorical body of knowledge we have arrived at disciplina as physical regulation and correction of the body. The implications of this semantic association for the discourse of scientific classification are readily apparent. To call a form or body of knowledge a discipline is to mark off its boundaries from another form of knowledge, and through this process of division to constitute that knowledge as an object. But it is not simply that disciplines create knowledge as a discursive object; as Foucault reminds us, the disciplinary order itself also becomes the object to be surveyed and regulated.23 From antiquity onwards we see that discussions of the disciplinary relations between the sciences often carry corrective and restrictive overtones. In the Institutio orataria, for example, Quintilian places firm restrictions on the territory of the grammarians, lest their work overlap with, or trespass into, the territory of the rhetoricians (1.9.6; 2.1.4-5).24 Even Quintilian’s attempts to promote a broad-based ’liberal’ education for the orator are predicated on precise taxonomies and hierarchical differentiations between the domains of the various arts (1.10.1-12.7). We find similarly deterrent boundaries placed around the individual disciplines in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologue et Mercurii. Grammar’s discourse is interrupted at the moment when she is about to discuss figures and tropes and introduce the question of metre (§ 326), subjects which are within the competence of grammatical teaching but which are normally governed by the disciplines of rhetoric and music respectively. Minerva also stops Dialectic from proceeding to the discussion of sophistic arguments, asserting that such a subject will dishonour the discipline of dialectic (§ 423). As these examples suggest, disciplinary structures function to contain and regulate bodies of knowledge, just as the human body is often subject to corrective discipline as a guard against moral or physical transgression. But disciplinary formations in turn are also subject to such corrective measures, so that it is not simply raw knowledge that is embodied as an object of control, but the construction of the discipline itself. The discourse of intellectual taxonomy, classification of the sciences, carries a clearly restrictive imperative that can be understood both in terms of the interests of territoriality, to mark off one intellectual property or domain from another, and of subjugation, to ensure the manageability of individual scientific systems.

The obvious link between disciplina as a science and disciplina as punishment is correction. But metaphorically the link is the body. It is this deep and secure metaphorical linkage that rhetoric, with its particular claims to disciplinary legitimacy, seems always to unfix. We see this in the important statements of Plato and Aristotle on rhetoric. In Plato’s Gorgias, the sophist Gorgias argues that rhetoric’s disciplinary power lies in its open borders; the art of persuasive speech comprises or overlaps all other arts. For Socrates the permeability of rhetoric makes it no science at all, but a mere knack gained from experience, a counterfeit of true science that panders (like cookery and cosmetics) to gratification and pleasure.25 In identifying rhetoric with the temporal contingencies of experience and the arts of the pleasure-seeking body, Plato’s text suggests that rhetoric is a kind of incontinent body that does not know its own boundaries. The discipline that Socrates imposes on the transgressive, permeable body of rhetoric is to condemn it to the realm of bodily provisionality from which it can make no claim to scientific integrity. Aristotle’s rigorous programme of scientific classification recasts the Platonic hierarchy of knowledge in more pragmatic institutional terms. In the Rhetoric Aristotle says that rhetoric, like dialectic, is a tool (organon) of inquiry, not a science; rhetoric and dialectic ’are concerned with such things as are, to a certain extent, within the knowledge of all people and belong to no separately defined science’.26 But for Aristotle, the permeability of rhetoric positions it, not only outside any disciplinary category, but in opposition to the body. Rhetoric is a system of artifice, of construction or invention of the modes of persuasion; the body is a natural site of truth which furnishes preexisting (’inartificial’ or ’extrinsic’) proof in the form of evidence extracted from slaves under torture.27 In Athenian judicial discourse, as Page duBois argues, the slave represents a primordial form of bodiliness, and the slave body is a secret repository of truth to be yielded up (and possessed by free men) through the application of torture.28 In this context Aristotle uses the body to describe a coherent realm of truth in counterdistinction to the artificial system of representation that is rhetoric.29

In neither of these models is the body represented within the discipline of rhetoric. For Plato rhetoric is only body and thus a counterfeit discipline; for Aristotle, rhetoric is outside disciplinary order and in opposition to the body. It is Roman teaching on the art that places the body securely within the disciplinary order of rhetoric and judges rhetoric through its bodily manifestations. The political and pedagogical institutions of Roman culture confer on rhetoric a privileged status as the highest of the arts because of its application to the pragmatic interests of civic oratory. But because rhetoric holds so crucial a cultural position it is the more subject to severe containment, monitoring, or scrutiny. It is here that rhetoric is truly invented as a discipline; it becomes a body capable of yielding up valid knowledge provided that it is successfully managed. Most importantly, to regulate rhetoric is to control its artificial excesses; in this context artifice, and especially ornamentation, is identified with mere bodily form, comparable to Plato’s notion of counterfeit gratification. Whereas for Aristotle artifice is bodiless, in Roman theory artifice is inscribed on the body, as the possibility of monstrous or corrupt disfigurement; it is only by subjecting rhetoric’s body to a disciplinary regime that its transgressive potential can be channelled into the production of truth. Significantly rhetoric here registers its own unrestrained artifice and permeability in terms of the disfigured body and the sexually ambiguous body. The Rhetorica ad Herennium, which was to become the main authority on style in the Middle Ages, represents style that has gone out of control in terms of the tumorous or disjointed body:

As this example suggests, rhetoric can legitimise itself as a true discipline if it can expose—and thus subject to severe disciplinary scrutiny—its own capacity for distortion. In other words, rhetoric needs its own potential for transgression in order to demonstrate its capacity for self-discipline.

Quintilian’s Institutio orataria is even more explicit on this point, registering the threat of an unlicensed artifice in terms of the sexually permeable body, the body that has crossed the acceptable bounds of gender identity into a kind of monstrous spectacle:

This remarkable passage, from Quintilian’s prologue to his lengthy discussion of style, gives expression to what was always implicit in the condemnation of rhetoric; that the undisciplined body is a sexually wayward body, that pandering and gratification are tantamount to a weakening of sexual identity, and that the disciplinary permeability of rhetoric is nothing less than ambiguity of gender. Stylistic excrescence allows the well-trained, masculine body to sink into effeminacy (not femininity), counterfeiting its proper virility. It is interesting that rhetoric’s anxiety about its corporeality is given the most striking expression in relation to style, that rhetoric admits its own propensity for unruly excess when it turns to consider its most visible aspect, elocutio. Style is the part of rhetoric that can be seen, and as such is always in danger of being considered merely deceptive surface, whether as dress on the body or as the bodily exterior itself. It thus also threatens to be taken for the body as a whole, to reduce by perverse metonymy the art of eloquentia to pandering style, the body to its appearance. But style is not an external excrescence that can be surgically removed and expelled from the realm of rhetoric. It is a function inherent to rhetoric. Rhetoric cannot deny or suppress the force of body as appearance, for it operates through the persuasive appeal of appearance. Thus to constitute itself as a proper discipline, rhetoric repeatedly—almost ritually—re-enacts and enforces its self-discipline by exposing its continual struggle with its wayward body.32 It invents itself as a discipline by inventing a corrupt bodily image over which it can always be seen to be triumphing by determined self-discipline. And part of its self-discipline is to punish that counter-image of its body by exposing it to public condemnation as a kind of trophy of its agonistic victory over its own unruliness. This is borne out at wearisome length in nearly all rhetorical manuals from antiquity to the Middle Ages (and beyond), which illustrate precept through sharp castigation of defective practice.

Thus on the terms of its own construction, rhetoric, like the body, must be subjected to a healthy regimen, disciplined lest it lapse into license, disease, or disfigurement.33 The most familiar image of rhetoric is female excess. Martianus Capella’s allegorical depiction of Rhetoric as a garish, physically imposing woman in martial attire whose swollen speech threatens to overrun the time allotted to it is not far removed from representations of rhetoric as a richly arrayed mistress or even a female courtesan.34 But the other common trope, which we have already seen in Quintilian, uses the male body to identify an undisciplined rhetoric with transgressive sexuality. In the Middle Ages, images of masculine licence are tied to the enforcement of social constraints on male clerical sexual behaviour.35 The most familiar medieval example of this is Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae, which describes the corruption of the language arts of the trivium in terms of proscribed sexual practice, representing the effect of rhetorical figuration in terms of bodily disfigurement:

The governing image of Alan’s text (announced in metre 1) suggests that the vice of tropes, departing from the governance of grammar, has turned man into hermaphrodite.37 In the passage above, the perversion of rhetoric results in the defilement of appearance. Here, as in the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Quintilian, rhetoric displays the effects of perverse figuration.

Alan’s text represents an indictment of rhetoric from outside the borders of the discipline. But as we see elsewhere, the figural relationship of rhetoric to the transgressive body is so ingrained in discourse about the art that rhetoric even teaches its own precepts through this trope. In the Ars versificatoria of Matthew of Vendôme, one of the models of rhetorical descriptio takes as its subject the depravities of Davus (a stock figure of ancient comedy). Here the pedagogical occasion of exemplifying rhetorical descriptio through the attributes of the person becomes the vehicle for exposing the vices of rhetoric:38

39

In this extraordinary and explicit passage, the body that knows no boundaries is one with a debilitated rhetoric; impossible metonymy is the attribute of Davus, and Davus embodies impossible metonymy. The ostensible subject here is not the nature of rhetoric, but the nature of Davus. The real subject, however, is the technique of rhetorical descriptio which this passage teaches through exemplification. But the vehicle of this particular pedagogy is the image of the incontinent sexual body, where the breaking of (hetero)sexual correctness is the sign of unlicensed permeability and of lawless metonymy (Davus is ’foul’ outside and within, so that there are no borders between container and contained). Here the transgressive body is used to teach rhetorical descriptio, and within that corrective teaching is identified with an ’incorrect’ rhetoric.

As these examples suggest, rhetoric is invented through constructions of sexual transgression. As a sexual body, rhetoric can be disciplined from within its own system through a kind of enforced purity, in which it is compelled to expose, and therefore be purged of, its excesses. This is the model that we see in Quintilian and Matthew of Vendôme, who teach rhetoric through the proscription of sexual-rhetorical vice. Or, as we see in Alan of Lille, rhetoric can be disciplined from outside its own system, through subordination to external governance, such as the balanced structure of the trivium, which maintains the ’body’ of science in a ’normative’ or prescriptive (sexual) order.42 In both cases we see the operation of what Jonathan Dollimore has called, after Foucault, a ’politics of containment’.43 Giving rhetoric a sexual body establishes a discursive construct through which institutional power can work. Rather than simply eliding the sexual body, the institutional powers of pedagogy, literature, and intellectual tradition continually stage their repression of the body, and it is in this drama of its own correction that rhetoric willingly participates.

This is the nexus of ideas that lies behind Chaucer’s Pardoner. As Robert Payne has acutely recognised, the Pardoner is more than a figure of corrupt preaching in the particular context of late-medieval anti-fraternalism; in the form of corrupt preacher he is a figure out of long traditions of theoretical contest about rhetoric as a science, of debate going back to the Gorgias about rhetoric’s appeal to appearances, contingency, appetite, will, and belief.44 But it is the Pardoner’s bodily presence, the sexual ambiguity of his bodily appearance, that most clearly associates him with the representation of rhetoric in the tradition that leads from Quintilian to the medieval language arts. The narrator’s description of him in the General Prologue as either ’a geldyng or a mare’ (1.691),45 pointing either to a disfiguring absence or a transgression of gender boundaries, can be taken as a realisation, a making literal, of the figuring of rhetoric as an emasculated or effeminate male body. In this, of course, Chaucer’s Pardoner has his most direct literary forebear in Faus Semblant of the Roman de la Rose, whose incarnation of false preaching takes the form of indeterminate gendering; as Carolyn Dinshaw points out, Faus Semblant is both man and woman.46 Both Faus Semblant and the Pardoner are products of the metaphorical tradition of rhetoric as unregulated sexuality. But with the Pardoner’s embodiment of rhetoric, the metaphors of rhetoric as body achieve a crucial and complex articulation. The social politics of sexuality and the institutional politics of rhetoric meet with renewed force in the performance of the Pardoner and the claims that he makes for the disciplinary autonomy of rhetoric.

The Pardoner’s performance is realised through images of the disabled, fragmented body and unruly appetite. As recent readers of the text have pointed out, the Pardoner professionally associates himself with the purveying of false relics, which are merely fragments of animal bodies cut off from reference to any symbolic unity beyond themselves; he even submits his own body to a figurative dismemberment when he describes his physical gestures during his preaching in terms of a grotesque choreography of nodding neck and busy tongue and hands (6.395-9).47 His own body, of course, is fragmented or dismembered, and the text continually plays with the linguistic and symbolic substitution of relics and other objects, such as the bag of pardons in his lap (General Prologue, 686-7), for the ’coillons’ or testicles that the Pardoner apparently lacks.48 But beyond the force of these visual emblems of fragmentation, the Pardoner’s discourse is linked with and follows from the Physician’s Tale, a story which offers the choice of a defiled maidenhead or a decapitation.49 The Physician’s Tale leaves us with the headless body of Virginia, the patriarchal vindication of Virginius, and the punishment of the lascivious judge Appius whose violent and wayward bodily appetites have moved him to violate the girl’s virginity and the family honour that places so much emphasis on her intact virtue. There is not much left intact at the end of this story, save a rigid social code predicated on male power over the female body; the transgressive will of the prospective rapist and the violent defence of the girl’s bodily integrity. Such a story scarcely brooks interpretative intervention from its listeners; their response is that of powerlessness. Indeed, the tale told by the Physician makes the audience sick. Harry Bailly says that the story so grieves him that he thinks it will almost give him cardiac arrest: ’But wel I woot thou doost myn heare to erme/ That I almoost have caught a cardynacle’ (6.312-13). Unless he has a drink or hears a merry tale, he tells us, ’myn heare is lost for pitee of this mayde’ (6.317). Harry’s threatened heart attack is as vivid a rhetorical response as we could want; both inside and outside the Physician’s Tale there are bodies fragmented, dead, or dying, from the decapitated Virginia to Harry’s ’cardynacle’ or chest pains.

The Host’s call to the Pardoner to supply a pleasant diversion, ’som myrthe or japes’, and the protesting call from the ’gentils’ of the company for ’som moral thyng’ (6.319, 325), move us from the power, in the Physician’s Tale, of an arbitrary and rigid law which requires obedience without interpretation, to the affective power of rhetoric, which requires only belief. Indeed, it is one of the powers traditionally ascribed to rhetoric to be able to fulfil the opposing demands of mirth and morality, to offer something that is moral and edifying but at the same time pleasant and entertaining. The Pardoner’s brief here is to offer something curative for the Host’s disabled body, and by extension for the whole company, in this sense the social body constituting the audience and judge of a rhetorical performance. The Pardoner achieves his curative effects, however, not through his tale, but through his very presence as an embodiment—literally a bodying forth—of the danger of rhetoric. If the horrible rigidity of the Physician’s Tale strips the audience of its interpretative power and ethical leverage, of its capacity to make sense of an uncompromising law that permits (in Virginia’s words), ’no grace … no remedye’ (6.236), it seems that the community can regain its ethical and interpretative bearings when it learns how to govern and contain the force of rhetoric. The Pardoner’s disquisition on rhetoric, his lecture on his own techne in his Prologue, teaches not just a body of rhetorical theory, but the means of controlling this body, how to make the body of rhetoric yield up its dangerous truths about itself so that it can be regulated from outside. The Pardoner’s ’medicine’ is to deliver up his professional secrets into the company’s disciplinary control. As we know, it is in the act of threatening the Pardoner with corrective violence at the end of his tale that Harry Bailly springs back to life, miraculously cured.

My discussion here focuses on the Pardoner’s Prologue. The Prologue dramatises in a very concentrated way something that I have described earlier in this essay as one of the key characteristics of rhetoric’s discourse about itself: its compulsion to perform its disciplinary instabilities by performing the exposure of its own vices, thereby inviting (or establishing the need for) disciplinary correction. The Pardoner’s Prologue is a consummate performance of rhetoric’s self-exposure of its transgression and counterfeit. There are, of course, a number of ways in which the Pardoner’s text differs in its dynamics from traditional rhetorical texts. Most obviously, the Pardoner does not himself demonstrate the self-governance of rhetoric from within its own text; unlike Quintilian, who stages rhetoric’s vices in order to show how rhetoric can redeem itself by monitoring its own transgressions, the Pardoner simply stages the incontinence of his rhetoric, and leaves it to the dramatic response of his audience (in the person of Harry Bailly) to complete the work of punishing and containing his waywardness. Along more complex lines, the Pardoner’s discourse does not need to make explicit the identification of a transgressive rhetoric with ’distortion’ of the sexual body; this has already been accomplished dramatically through the person of the Pardoner, who embodies the sexual (dis)figuring of rhetoric. Thus while the Pardoner’s discourse is yielding up the ’truth’ about rhetoric’s persuasive appeal to mere appearances, his bodily appearance and attributes—his high voice, his beardlessness, his playing at male fashion (’hym thoughte he rood al of the newe jet’, GP 682), as well as his excessive ’stylistic’ display of both hetero- and homosexual roles50—are yielding up or pointing to the ’truth’ about his body, that is, his alienation from the masculine, heterosexual norm of patriarchal cultural power. One way of reading the truth about his body, as Dinshaw notes, is that we cannot know; the Pardoner may or may not be a eunuch, his exterior may or may not be consistent with his interior.51 All we have is the narrator’s judgment or belief, based on his appearance: ’I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare’ (GP 691). The appearance of the Pardoner’s body produces, not conviction of truth, but mere belief. This is also the very mechanism by which the Pardoner, as a latter-day Gorgias, describes the efficacy of his rhetoric; as the sophist must admit to Socrates, oratory produces only belief based on provisional appearances, not conviction based on knowledge of truth.52 But another way of reading the question of his ’truth’ is that his body, in conjunction with his rhetoric, becomes a locus of truth for others to know and possess, that his body and rhetoric together confess or yield up the truth about themselves into the corrective possession of his audience. The ’truth’ is that his body is permeable, without definable gender identity, just as his permeable and ambiguous rhetoric defies proper disciplinary identity; because he cannot be known, he must be contained the more severely. Thus at the end of his Tale, when the Pardoner singles out the Host as the one ’moost envoluped in synne’ (6.942) and tries to purvey to Harry the very relics that he has just finished describing as false, the Host’s threat of violent (re)castration, ’I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hon … Lat kutte hem of’ (6.952-4), directs itself at the incontinence of the Pardoner’s rhetoric through the ambiguity of the Pardoner’s sexual body.

In his Prologue, the Pardoner describes how he gains the trust of gullible crowds by preying on their fears and displaying false relics, and he asserts the alienation of his own moral condition from the moral effect of his preaching:

From a technical point of view, the Pardoner’s speech is a careful manifesto on ethos or ethical proof, the Aristotelian principle of a speaker’s representation of his own character as part of his material for persuasion.53 Aristotle’s model of ethical proof survives in the Middle Ages in some attenuated forms in the artes praedicandi which recommend persuasive appeal to audiences.54 But Robert Payne’s crucial insight into the Pardoner’s discourse is that it represents, within the terms of Chaucerian poetics, a forceful new articulation of the theory of character as a form of persuasion.55 The Pardoner speaks de arte, that is, about the mechanics of his rhetoric, and describes in some detail how he invents an authoritative character for himself when he preaches, how he constructs a credible persona through his techniques of delivery and through his personal and professional display. When preaching in churches, he says, ’I peyne me to ban an hauteyn speche/ And rynge it out as round as gooth a belle’ (6.330-1); he always announces from where he has come, shows his papal bulls along with the authorising seal on his letter patent (in order, he says, ’my body to warente’ [6.338]), and then proceeds to display the paraphernalia of his trade (indulgences and relics), all the while sprinkling his speech with a few words of Latin to impress the crowds and ’stire hem to devocioun’ (6.346). The construction of character for the purpose of persuasion is certainly efficacious, even on the terms of his vicious mockery of the enterprise: ’Thus spitte I out my venym under hewe/ Of hoolynesse, to semen hooly and trewe’ (6.422-3; my emphasis).

Through his articulation of appeal to ethos or character as a means of persuasion, the Pardoner makes a strong claim for the disciplinary autonomy of rhetoric. According to the Pardoner, the efficacy of rhetoric should depend on nothing except its own art; its success need be tied to no moral system, no verification of truth beyond the belief that it produces. The most immediate contexts for the Pardoner’s pronouncement that ’many a predicacioun/ Comth ofte tyme of yvel entencioun’ (6.407-8) are scholastic debates about the efficacy of immoral preachers and the proper fulfilment of the office of preaching.56 But his question, the relation of a speaker’s character to his speech, has a much longer history in rhetorical theory, in the anxiety of rhetoricians such as Quintilian to differentiate a ’responsible’—that is, institutionally validated—rhetoric from the ’debased’ or institutionally discredited theory of the sophists.57 I would like to read the Pardoner’s pronouncements about the autonomy of rhetorical techne as a kind of staging—however historically unlikely it may be—of the momentary possibility of a sophistic rhetoric. The Pardoner gives a view of rhetoric that is very much like that of the sophists, a view of a world to be negotiated through language and skilful argument rather than through a priori truth value, and in which there need be no coherence between the moral content of the message and the moral character of the speaker.58 This is the epistemology of an autonomous rhetoric which emerged the loser in ancient debate, which Plato’s institution of philosophy discredited, and the history of which came to be written by its adversaries.59

Whether or not Chaucer knew anything directly or indirectly about the sophists is not important here; the mechanics of suppression, Socrates (Plato) of Gorgias, the Host (or even Chaucer) of the Pardoner, are almost the same. Just as Socrates condemns Gorgias’ rhetoric to the realm of mere bodily fragmentation from which it can make no claims to disciplinary integrity, so the Pardoner is condemned to make his claims for rhetoric in the person, in the body, of an unwhole man. It is here that his manifesto on ethos is subsumed by the dramatic manifestatio of the ’truth’ about rhetoric that he is compelled to perform. More than a system of ethical proof, the Pardoner’s Prologue is an exercise in rhetorical descriptio designed to manifest character, such as Matthew of Vendôme exemplifies in his description of Davus.60 The corruption or moral vacuity of character that the Pardoner manifests—his pronouncements on his bald avarice, his indifference to the ’correccioun of synne’ (6.404)—is metonymic for the deficiency or permeability of his sexual body and the incontinence of his rhetoric. The Pardoner’s performance or manifestatio of his character is nothing less than a ritual exposure of the vices and transgressions of the body of rhetoric. Any claims for the disciplinary autonomy of rhetoric that the Pardoner may make through his exposition of ethos will be immediately invalidated by the self-admitted transgressiveness of the character that makes the claims.

Yet it is through his confessional exposure of his vices that the Pardoner’s discourse stages the invention of rhetoric as a discipline. As a figure of rhetoric the Pardoner differs from Gorgias in one significant way: where the fragmentary body of rhetoric in the Gorgias consigns it to the sphere of non-science, of mere knack like cooking, the Pardoner represents the tradition of rhetoric that I have traced here from later antiquity to the Middle Ages, in which rhetoric comes into being as a discipline by offering up its corrupt or counterfeit body to be disciplined. The production of scientific truth here about the body and about rhetoric is enabled through the ritual of confession;61 and the Pardoner’s confession differs only in dramatic degree, not in kind, from the compulsive self-exposure that we have seen rhetoric undertake in its various pedagogical and technical appeals, from Quintilian to Matthew of Vendôme. At the end of his Tale, where the Pardoner turns to his audience and, as if mechanically compelled to complete his whole routine, invites the Host to kiss the relics that he has just proclaimed to be false, it is not that he has forgotten his audience; rather, it is that the dynamic of rhetoric is to confess and perform itself continually, to display and stage its wilful excess.

The Pardoner’s manifesto on ethos and his larger manifestatio of rhetoric have already given the pilgrims the key to his techne by showing them how the art of persuasion works. Now that they understand how rhetoric works as a professional system they are in a position of power to regulate it. The Pardoner has theorised and performed a powerful rhetoric that threatens to exceed its proper limits; what is important is that the necessity to contain and thereby discipline rhetoric is expressed by the Host as a threat of violence against the Pardoner’s body. The Host enacts the disciplining of rhetoric by naming the Pardoner’s bodily deficiency. The Host, rebounding from his ’cardynacle’, wishfully threatens to castrate the Pardoner, swearing in the optative mood that he would like to cut off the Pardoner’s coillons:

The denunciation and threatened assault is a public humiliation tantamount to public punishment. It is a punishment directed at the Pardoner’s rhetoric through the Pardoner’s body, for his body, ambiguous, transgressive, probably already emasculated, reproduces the nature of his crime, rhetoric. Foucault’s observations about the value of public torture and execution are strikingly (if anachronistically) relevant here: through those public procedures of criminal discipline,

It is through this kind of public display at the end of the Pardoner’s Tale that the containment of rhetoric, and thus its induction into disciplinary order, takes place. Just as the Pardoner has exposed the capacity of rhetoric for distortion, the Host now exposes the Pardoner’s bodily disfigurement. For the Host to want to castrate a man who is already a eunuch is to want to punish him for the crime of monstrous distortion that his body has already committed, to reinscribe that crime in a public, ritual way. On the logic of its own tradition of self-representation, rhetoric does become a genuine discipline here; even the kiss that Harry gives to the Pardoner to mend their rupture inscribes the Pardoner and his rhetoric in a system of discursive control. Under this regime, rhetoric will produce the truth about itself.

Rhetoric and its disciplinary formation may be apprehended through intellectual history and textual analysis; but we cannot forget that rhetoric is a discourse of the real world, of temporality, circumstance, shifting interests and fragmented experience; in other words, a discourse of the body itself. The Pardoner and his sophistic forebears hold out the possibility of a critically detached knowledge ’in the subjunctive mode’, as Nancy Struever has described rhetoric’s shaping of language as contingent experience, feeling and desire.63 But its very capacity for such a contingent detachment inevitably places rhetoric in conflict with hierarchical disciplinary interests that would seek to constrain its epistemological permeability. Thus in the Middle Ages, rhetoric’s techne is channelled or pressed into the service of dominant interests; it is accessory to grammar in primary education, to logic in the cathedral schools and universities, or it is ’redeemed’ through its harnessing to scriptural study and homiletics, as we see from Augustine to Bede and Aquinas. Even with its magnification, in the civic ideologies of Brunetto Latini and Dante, to the highest order of statecraft, it is still contained and delimited, its capacity for artifice and manufacturing of belief firmly regulated by the reigning institutional science of politics. The subjunctive autonomy that rhetoric would claim for itself, even today, to be a kind of metadiscipline, would also constitute a kind of science of the body in history, a science of provisionality, contingency, and even fragmentation. The legitimisation and ’disciplining’ of rhetoric is inevitably its repression, a process in which rhetoric participates by naming its own bodiliness.

Source

From Framing Medieval Bodies, edited by Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (1994), pp. 138-159. Copyright © 1994 by the New Chaucer Society. Reprinted by permission of the New Chaucer Society.

Notes