The End of The Summoner’s Tale and the Uses of Pentecost

The End of The Summoner's Tale and the Uses of Pentecost Glending Olson Cleveland State University pech,ps ch, mosat out ofpe ayre sal com doun tite, And omang his disciples don light, And with sere tunges ti! ]Jam spek ryght, Als dyd ti! j:Je apostels j:Je haly gast And pat sal be in mens sight mast, For pa pat his disciples sal be cald Sal ]Jam avant, and ]Jam selfhald Better of!ifand to God mare dere, pan ever war Cristes appostels here.1 ' Antichrist's phony Pentecost is not mentioned in all medieval discus­ sions of his deceptions, but it seems to be fairly well established, and it 1 1 The Pricke ofConscience. ed. Richard Morris (Berlin: A. Asher, 1863), p. 117, lines 4257-60. On the poem and its distribution throughout late-medieval England, see Robert E. Lewis and Angus McIntosh, A Descriptive Guide to the Manuscripts ofthe Prick of Conscience, Medium IEvum Monographs, n.s., 12 (Oxford, Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1982). The authors say (p. 13) that Chaucer might have known The Prick. citing the parallels mentioned in Kate 0. Petersen's The Sources ofthe Parson'.r Tale (Boston: Ginn, 1901). Few of these seem distinctive; in his notes to The Parson's Tale in The Riverside Chaucer, Siegfried Wenzel mentions parallels between the works in just two places (lines 253-54 and 1076-80), neither unique. 1 ' Lines 4290-300. Here, and throughout its treatment of Antichrist, The Prick is indebted to Hugh Ripelin of Strassburg's Compendium theologicae veritatis 7.9: "malignum spiritum faciet super eos descendere, ut loquantur variis linguis. Spiritus enim malignus descender in eos in conspectu hominum, sicut Spiritus sanctus descendit in Aposrolos Christi. Unde jacrabunt se esse meliores Apostolis Christi, qui Spiritum acceperunt in conclavi." The Compendium was attributed to various authors, including Albertus Mag­ nus, and is printed in Auguste Borgnet's edition of Albert's Opera onmia, vol. 34 (Paris: Vives, 1895); this passage is on p. 242. 218 THE END OF THE SUMMONER'S TALE is among those staged in the Chester Antichrist pageant.16 Chester is the only one of the four more-or-less complete surviving cycles to have an Antichrist play, and the text is of course late. However, the Lollard Tretise ofMiraclis Pleyinge, which dates from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, establishes that there were earlier enactments of this subject in England,17 so that performance of a parodic Pentecost as part ofa staging ofthe story ofAntichrist could well have been contempora­ neous with Chaucer. Antichrist's parodic Pentecost can also be found in medieval art, where the depictions, like those of the true Pentecost, are suggestive enough of an emanation downward upon receivers to be a plausible prompt for the imaginative play of the Summoner's final scene. A series of eight illustrations of Apocalypse 13 in the Bible moralisee (British Library MS Harley 1527, fol. 136v) shows Antichrist's imitations of Christ's death, resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Holy Spirit. The roundel illustrating this last act includes the two-horned beast, the seven-headed beast, and rays offire falling on the heads offollowers from a mask above, a precise visualization of Apoc. 13: 13 ("ignem faceret de caelo descendere in terram in conspectu hominum"). Directly below it is a traditional Pentecost scene, with rays of fire leading out of the mouth of a dove onto the apostles. 18 The suitability of this portion of the medieval lore of Antichrist to Chaucer's designs in The Summoner's Tale becomes clearer when we con­ sider his immediate social context. Identification ofAntichrist, Emmer­ son points out, proceeded throughout the Middle Ages in two different ways. The "historical" or exegetical Antichrist was that being (man or monster) who would lead the forces of evil against Christendom in the last stage of the sixth age of history. But there was also a more general­ ized Antichrist, what Emmerson calls a "polemical" Antichrist, or rather 11' See Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages. pp. 132-33, 183, and 284-85 n. 54, and p. 234 below. Szittya, Antifraternal Tradition, p. 246, discusses the...