"Withyn a temple ymad of glas": Glazing, Glossing, and Patronage in Chaucer's House of Fame

And for my part, I can remembre weell,Whan I gladdest in that fresshe sesoun,Lyke brotyl glasse, not stable, nor lyk stell,Fer out of harre, wilde of condicioun,Ful geryssh, and voyde of all resoun,Lyk a phane, ay turnyng to and fro,Or like an orloge whan the peys is goo.

—John Lydgate, The Testament of Dan John Lydgate¹

But as I slepte, me mette I wasWithyn a temple ymad of glas.

—Geoffrey Chaucer, House of Fame²

The point of intersection between these two epigraphs is, of course, glass. John Lydgate's "glasse," like the "fresshe sesoun" of spring, is brittle and uncertain stuff. It is inherently untrustworthy, fragile, and garish, inconstant as a turning weather vane or the hands of an unbalanced clock. This is the glass that Lydgate describes in Reson and Sensuallyte as "ful of brotelnesse," and that he envisions in the Troy Book when he calls Ulysses "Brotel as glas, pretendinge outward stel."³ This, too, is the glass that Daw refers to in the Second Shepherd's Play when he laments a world "euer in drede and brekyll as glas," and that the author of the Book of Vices and Virtues evokes when he decries worldly knowledge as "bruteler and febler þan is þe glas."⁴

Lydgate's "brotyl glasse" is also what most critics of Chaucer's House of Fame seem to imagine when they consider the temple of Venus. Like the poem's other buildings—the temple of Fame atop its "feble fundament" of ice (1132) and the wicker-work labyrinth of rumor whirling "swyft as thought" (1924)—Chaucer's "temple ymad of glas" appears as an architectural emblem of fragility. And because its glass walls are covered with representations of Virgil's Aeneid—because they are, like the windows of a gothic cathedral, a de facto visual text—the temple has frequently been a touchstone for readers considering the House of Fame's fraught relationship to textual authority. For Alastair Minnis, "the large amount of glass in the temple of Venus is a symbol of the very insubstantiality of the structure—which is entirely made of glass."⁵ Similarly, B. G. Koonce and J. A. W. Bennett point to the "brittleness" and "fragility" of glass, while Piero Boitani posits that "glass, of which the temple of Venus is made," belongs to an "artificial universe of immobility, fragility, transparency and magnification."⁶ These analyses, which suggest a thematic link between the temple's narrative glass walls and the brittleness of textual auctoritee, support the commonly held view that the House of Fame both interrogates and subverts late medieval ideals of written authority, that it is fundamentally "dedicated to deconstructing authoritative texts from the literary and philosophical tradition."⁷

But there is more to glass than fragility. In Chaucer's Knight's Tale glass provides a suitable metaphor for the gleaming statue of Venus, who "fro the navele doun al covered was/With wawes grene, and brighte as any glas" (I 1957–58).⁸ In Pearl's heavenly city, the substance is clear and numinous—"Þe stretez of golde as glasse al bare [clear],/Þe wal of jasper þat glent as glayre"—while the streams and rivers of Lydgate's "Complaint of the Black Knight" run "pure as glas."⁹ Glass even serves as metaphor for the armor-hard scales of the dragon of Vice in the Lydgatean Assembly of the Gods : "Forthe then went Cerberus with hys Fyry cheyne/And brought thedyr Vyce …/…/On a glydyng serpent rydyng a gret pas,/Formyd lyke a dragoñ, scalyd harde as glas."¹⁰ John Trevisa summarizes such attributes in his fourteenth-century translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus's De Proprietatibus Rerum:

Glas … is ycleped vitrum for by his vertu he is bright and cleere, and light schyneþ þerþorugh … Glass fongeþ [assumes] and is ydied wiþ alle maner of colour so þat it foloweþ iacinctus [jacinth], smaragdus [emerald], and oþere precious stondes in colour and brightnesse. Also it is so pliaunt...