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7 Grave Misgivings in De Tribus Regibus Mortuis) The Awntyrs offArthure, and Somer Sunday WHILE ALL OF THE ALLITERATIVE ROMANCES treated in this book explore and exploit the disjunctions between past and present, few alliterative poems face the dark backward and abysm of time with the directness of De Tribus Regibus Mortuis and TheAwntyrs offArthure. These didactic alliterative poems isolate, crystallize, and drive to extremes defining features of the other alliterative romances in this study in order to pronounce judgment upon them. The past distills itself into the shape of the dead, as monarchs are brought face to face with their dead fathers and mothers. The disruptions of death and temporality which trouble the chivalric performances of Gawain, Alexander, and Arthur here loom like leviathans and take on a wider social urgency. In the long-ago epigraph to this book, the dead are invested with the task of forcing the living to confront their most cherished evasions and that is precisely what happens in these poems: the past becomes intimate enough to the present to take on the roles of social reminder and self-interrogator. Both of these poems highlight the continuing role of the dead in society not just in the form of the legacies they leave, or the prayers they solicit, but also in the kinds of social/ self-examinations they adjure.1 In this they refuse the conventions of penitential social disengagement-the Augustinian wariness toward too much investment in the earthly city as one peregrinates toward the heavenly one or the almshouse austerities promoted by fifteenth-century Learn to Die treatises. In these poems, the welfare of the dead is entrusted less to the judgments of God than to the practices of their living descendants, and the poems call the living to account in two ways. First, they present the living with the horrific consequences of forgetting the dead: death at large, rotting and burning as it roams the landscape, refusing to stay decently underground. Second, and even more interestingly, they put reformatory pressure upon the rituals and formal practices by which the late medieval society domesticated the disruptions of death. Two such practices are elucidated with particular intensity: (I) the way the living resocialize the dead as the dead by drawing them into mutually Chapter 7 beneficial gift economies through ritual exchanges of recognition, commemoration , capital, and prayer; (2) the way the living take on the social responsibilities of the dead in the inexact and anxious performances that Joseph Roach calls surrogation.2 These poems dramatize death to enforce recognition of the active role in late medieval society played by the dead and to interrogate the obligations of the living, not only to their dead but to their neighbors and fellow members in the social body. In these poems, to forget the dead is to corrode both self and society. This is an abiding preoccupation throughout the medieval period. Patrick Geary shows that the dead-saintly and secular, collective and individual-laid so many social and religious obligations upon earlier medieval societies that they actually functioned as an age group.3 He explores the range of pressures the dead exerted and the exchanges though with they are bound back into social life both to honor their heritages and delimit their social force. Throughout the period, the living traffic with the dead in seemingly incommensurate goods: prayer, property, relics, tombs, institutions, commemorations, and the construction of patronage. This devotion to the dead not only supports religious faith and its institutions but also becomes an engine for social work. Yet institutionalized means of remembrance and redress (proper funerary rites, trentals, commemorations) are not always adequate to assuage the guilt over the profit derived from the dead: their names, goods, and seigneurial power which the kings, queens, and courtiers of these poems have inherited and wield with such joy. Therefore, the experience of the past as death translates into an urgent concern with past, present, and future social life-the ways the noble characters have been living, the social hierarchies and institutions through which they enact their authority and enjoy their luxuries, and the eventual outcomes, not simply of the individual survivors but of their social ethos. The poems turn fear of individual death into an audit of the costs of an aristocratic status quo which is linchpinned by a monarchy indulging in paradigms of social redress that have become cosmetic, opportunities for self-display rather than genuine justice . These poems disinter the dead to bare the inequities...

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