“Now y lowve God”: The Process of Conversion in Sir Gowther

Ostensibly a triumphalist narrative recounting both the possibilities of Christian redemption and the surety of Christian military endeavors, the late Middle English poem Sir Gowther is at times a shocking text, even by the standards of medieval romance. Childless after ten years of marriage to the duke of Austria, a duchess encounters a man “as lyke hur lorde as he myght be” and the two have sex, after which the man stands up as “A felturd [hairy] fende” and announces he has “geyton a chylde on [her] / That in is yothe full wylde schall bee” (74, 76–77).¹ The demon’s words prove true, and the duchess delivers a child who, within the first year, prodigiously grows to the size others reach in seven years, slays nine nursemaids through monstrously gluttonous nursing, and even bites off his own mother’s nipple. When grown, Gowther rampages through the duchy, committing rape, arson, and other heinous crimes, and he ceases only when he learns of his demonic parentage and converts to a life of Christian penitence and humility. Battling his own pride and an army of Saracens, Gowther eventually becomes both emperor and saint, the once notorious sinner explicitly identified in one manuscript as Saint Guthlac. Drawn to the text by Gowther’s demonic actions and pedigree, critics have debated whether Gowther should be considered an Everyman figure or an atypical, even monstrous, sinner, thereby examining the romance as a commentary on chivalric identity, penitence, the mechanics of salvation, and the psychological and cultural processes at work in the text’s monstrous construction of alterity.² This essay focuses not on the representativeness of Gowther’s sins or what his penitence says about the possibilities for spiritual transcendence, but rather on the pattern of his conversion and the representation of the post-conversion self, demonstrating how both are deeply implicated in social attitudes toward conversion in the fifteenth century. Specifically, I claim this text fully participates in the fifteenth century’s sense of the problematics of conversion, a process referring both to the adoption of a previously unheld religion and the process undertaken by those who were already Christian but, in John Van Engen’s words, “voluntarily took up more intense forms of religious life.”³ Both senses of conversion are invoked in Sir Gowther, which constructs for the convert a space of radical indeterminacy in which his identity is never fully fixed, even after he has given up his sins and turned to God.

Demonic Conduct and Religious Conversion in Sir Gowther

From its very start, the poem emphasizes not just Gowther’s supernatural conception and infantile appetites but also the outrage subsequently engendered by this “warlocke greytt” and “his warcus wylde” once he embarks on a life of willful sin (22, 24). At the age of fifteen, Gowther fashions his own sword, a falchion, with which he terrorizes the duchy, and the duke knights him in an effort to curb his crimes. Like the baptism ceremony conducted at his birth, this knighting ceremony is meant to regulate identity by conferring inclusion in a larger community defined by ideology and proper conduct. Knighting, however, proves ineffective, and because of Gowther’s excessive actions his purported father dies “for sorro” (154). The duke’s death, moreover, further destabilizes the duchy, promoting Gowther to the rank of duke and endangering its people until, having learned of his demonic heritage, Gowther journeys to Rome to seek penance from the pope.

Noting how the new duke and his men rape an entire nunnery, after which Gowther sets fire to it and kills the inhabitants, scholars have identified Gowther’s focused persecution of the clergy, but the poem specifies he also attacks those who have not taken holy orders but who “on Cryst con lefe” (193).⁴ The list of atrocities committed against all Christians, professed and unprofessed, is substantial:

Meydyns maryage wolde he spyllAnd take wyffus ageyn hor wyll,And sley hor husbondus too,And make frerus to leype at kraggusAnd parsons for to heng on knaggus,And...