Consuming Childhood: Sir Gowther and National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.3.1

The eponymous protagonist of the medieval romance Sir Gowther is the child of a duchess who has been seduced by a demon. As an infant, Gowther suckles nine nurses to death and bites off his mother's nipple; in his later youth, he burns down a convent of nuns, rapes women, kills husbands, forces friars to jump off cliffs and parsons to hang themselves, and sets fire to a poor widow. Learning of his demonic paternity shortly thereafter, however, he travels in shame to Rome, where the pope assigns him the penance of neither speaking nor eating anything except from the mouths of dogs. Finding his way to an emperor's castle, he crouches silently under the dinner table in the hall, fighting with the dogs there for scraps of food. When the emperor engages in battle against a sultan who has demanded his mute daughter in marriage, Gowther prays for, and miraculously receives, armor, weapons, and a horse. For three days, thus disguised, he helps the emperor defeat the sultan's army, recognized only by the emperor's daughter, who feeds the household's hounds with bread and wine so that Gowther may have food to eat. On the third day of battle, however, he is seriously wounded, causing her to fall out of a tower with shock and dismay. When her grieving father summons the pope, she miraculously awakens and announces that God has forgiven Gowther, who marries her, builds a monastery for monks to pray for those he had persecuted in his youth, and eventually becomes known for performing healing miracles.

The scholarship on Sir Gowther has substantially illuminated two dominant narratives of transformation in the tale: Gowther's sociocultural transformation from a beastly creature to a productive member of human society, and his religious transformation from a soulless demon to a penitent miracle worker.¹ What has remained relatively unexplored, however, is what the tale's manuscript context can bring to bear on these tropes of metamorphosis. This study, then, focusing on the version of Sir Gowther that appears in an educational manuscript for children known as National Library of Scotland Advocates 19.3.1, will argue that the narratives of transformation within this version of the romance are structured by two competing cultural imaginaries of childhood as socially brutish but also spiritually redemptive, whereby Gowther simultaneously eats his way out of one model of childhood and back into the other.

Sir Gowther appears in two late fifteenth-century manuscripts, British Library Royal MS 17.B.43 (to which I will hereafter refer as Royal) and National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.3.1 (hereafter Advocates). Both versions are in twelve-line tail-rhyme stanzas and, though there are dialectal variations, scholars agree that both derive from the Northeast Midlands.² However, the two versions contain several significant differences. Generally, the Royal version is less explicit in its portrayal of violence than is the Advocates version. In both manuscripts, for example, Gowther gleefully burns a convent, and the nuns within it, to the ground. In Advocates, however, Gowther and his men rape the nuns before burning them alive. As Advocates boldly declares, "Thei wer full ferd of his body, / For he and is men bothe leyn hom by—Tho sothe why schuld y hyde?"³ Both the scene's inclusion and its defiant defense signal Advocates' keen interest in uncontrolled appetite, graphically iterated in another gory description of one of Gowther's first demonic acts, when he tears off his mother's nipple as a nursing infant: "Upon a day bad hym tho pappe, / He snaffulld to hit soo, / He rofe tho hed fro tho brest" (ll. 128-30). The same event, by contrast, is described much less sensationally in Royal: "He tare the oon side of hir brest."⁴ Still other scenes of consumption animate the Advocates version of the romance: the tale is bookended with feasts, beginning with a "mangere" (l. 39) at the wedding of the duke and duchess and ending with the "mangeyre" (l. 685) of Gowther's marriage...