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THE HORSE AND RIDER FIGURE IN CHAUCER'S WORKS BERYL ROWLAND As can be seen from its role in mythology and in the nightmare, the horse has appealed to the imagination of all ages as a symbol of generative power, and, as such, it can be either a good or a bad principle. It is a god or handsome prince, promising fertility and pleasure; a terrifying demon or witch, taking the rider to death and hell. Not surprisingly, when it combines with the rider to be used as a figure analogically, it retains the attributes which stem hom images and sensations deeply rooted in the human psyche. But under the influence of the Christian Church the significance of the figure appears to harden: the horse is equated with the body or with Woman, the evil repository of sex; the rider is the soul or Man. The horse and rider analogy is used extensively from early times to illustrate the precarious hold of the soul over the body. Plato applies the image in Phaedrus, and it becomes a popular one with expository writers.' Philo Judaeus, for example, writing in Hellenic Alexandria in the first century of the Christian era, makes the image serve as a graphic commentary on Exodus, xv, I: I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed glOriously: the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea. Distinguishing between the horseman who controls his horse and the rider who is carried wherever his horse wishes, he remarks that whereas the former subdues his passions and is saved, the latter, having no control, is thrown headlong. The horseman or rider, he explains, is the mind ( voli, ), the mount is appetite and passion ( ,..,OuI'1a Kat aul'O' ).' The Cesta Romanorum tells the story of a king on horseback who, having to choose hom inscriptions on a cross which road to follow, wisely selects the road which promises to take care of him but not his horse. The moralizacio expliCitly equates the horse with the body: "Carissimi, iste imperator potest dici quilibet bonus christianus, qui habet circa salutem anime sue equitare. Equus, qui eum portat, est corpus ex quatuor elementis compositum, crux que stat in medio vie est consciencia tua.'" In illustrations of the conflict between the virtues and vices in Prudentius' Psychomachia, the early fifth century epic which Volume xxxv, Number 3, April, 1966 THE HORSE AND RIDER FIGURE 247 was one of the most popular didactic works of the Middle Ages, Superbia and Luxuria are mounted on headstrong steeds and are violently overthrown.' In England during the mediaeval period the image appears frequently. In some instances the allusion is to the bridle which must curb man's sensual appetite-"son se gluterrnesse iss daed, / Sone iss pe bodiz bridledd."· In others the equation is more specific: the unknown writer of "A Tretyse of Costly Batayle" states that "like as one horse welletaught beryth hys mastere ouer many perylls and saueth hym fro perysshyng , so the body well-rewled bereth the soule ouer many peryllys off thys wrecched worlde," and the fourteenth century preacher, Bromyard, likens the sinner to the galloping horseman, with the vices as his steeds." Although the figure does not appear to have been transmitted through any of the versions of the Apocalypse of St. Paul, a work which had a profound influence on treatments of the Body and Soul Legend, it is used most elaborately in The Debate between the Body and the Soul," a poem extant in seven manuscripts, of which at least five have been assigned to the fourteenth century. It is a horrifying vision in which a worldly, pleasure-loving knight rides to hell, turning from hunter to quarry to be tortured by all the pains that Christian devils and the mediaeval imagination can devise. Driven on by hell-hounds, with fiends thrusting red-hot irons into his body, the victim is finally dragged to hell amid the obscene shouts of exultant demons. Set in a dream, with the poet awakening in terror, the work has close parallels with the angstvolle Traumfahrt of the nightmare, in which the helpless subject finds himself riding and ridden upon, hunter and hunted...

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