Chaucer’s Lollard Joke: History and the Textual Unconscious

The Biennial Chaucer Lecture Chaucer's Lollard Joke: History and the Textual Unconscious Paul Strohm Indiana University Atext may state (and therefore d;,cw,;;vely "know") things about itself, and it may remain silent on other matters (therefore not "know" them). In the latter instance our interest and our inquiry need not cease, for texts still carry forms of pre- or nondiscursive knowledge within their bounds. I am here presuming the existence of a textual unconscious, effectively constituted by and extensively correlated with that which the text represses.1 I will eventually suggest that the fullest understanding ofa text must include attention to what it represses, to the gaps, traces, and other derivatives of a textual unconscious. A text with an unconscious will most certainly have a conscious too, and I have no wish to understate the very considerable range and importance of a text's self-declarations. Such declarations might include its designated precursors (Statius, Petrarch); its ostensible audience (Gower, Strode); its ' Terms for construction ofsuch a correlation can be derived from Freud's "Repression'" and "The Unconscious," both published in The Standard Edition (hereafter SE) (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 14:147-48, 180-85. Entry into textuality may be thought to create the conditions for Freud's "primal repression" (p. 148). The text's reliance upon idea over affect, time over timelessness, and words over things (pp. 153, 187, 201) guarantees the denial offull expression to certain impulses. My emphasis on repression owes much to a talk given by Sarah Stanbury at Kalamazoo, Mich., in May 1994, in which she proposed a common ground between historicism and psychoanalysis, based on a shared assumption that the subject-whether the analysand or the historical text---cannot know itselfbecause ofits implication in strategies and practices ofrepression. For a discussion in which primacy repression is fruitfully treated as the effective founding moment of a textual unconscious, augmented through processes ofsecondary repression, see ElizabethJ. Bellamy, Translations ofPower (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 38--81. 23 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER acknowledged exclusions ("I wol nat seyn"); its professed genre (tragedy, "storie"); its conflictual terms (destiny versus free will, tyranny or singular­ ity versus common profit); its meaning or sentence ("swych fyn . . ."). I mean this list to be a substantial one, and in no way derisory. Most of my own work--<:ertainly until the latter chapters of Social Chaucer and possi­ bly beyond-has relied heavily on things texts choose rather directly and manifestly to announce, on valuable information either proffered or left hidden in plain sight. But certain matters cannot be pursued in a text's own terms. What about Chaucer's suppression ofhis debts to Boccaccio? What ifThe Miller's Tale turns out not to be about jealousy at all? What other willed misdirec­ tions or less purposeful misrecognitions displace Chaucerian narratives from their announced emphases and goals? In whichever of the theoretical languages it is ultimately to be made, the crucial point remains: certain textual duplicities, withholdings, omissions, and (especially) repressions can be identified only from a vantage point outside the textual system. My touchstone here is the familiar, and telling, observation that "the field cannot well be seen from within the field." (Incidentally, although bearing some ofthe marks ofthe latest poststructural dictum, this observa­ tion derives from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Circles.")2 Many of us are fa­ miliar with MyraJehlen's related suggestion that feminists need often "to talk about texts in terms that the author did not use, may not have been aware of, and might indeed abhor." She formulates her position in terms of Archimedes' lever, which must be planted on "external ground" if it is to move the earth.3 Fine and exciting work has been and will be completed by those who seek to stand on the text's own ground; still, the investigator who refuses to move to an external ground accepts a tacit limitation. Analysis conducted on the text's own ground limits itself to what may be described as knowl­ edgeable reiteration or "respectful doubling" of a text's assumptions.4 But 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Works (Harvard: Belknap Press, 1979), 2:185. 3 MyraJehlen, "Archimedes and the Paradox ofFeminist Criticism," in TheSigns Reader (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1983), pp. 69-95. 4 The phrase is taken from Jacques Derrida, 0/ Grammatology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158. I do not claim originality for this observation. It has been made, and practiced, in a number ofrecent studies in our field. I am thinking, for example, ofRalph Hanna's recent critique ofa glossing practice that "perpetuates uncriti­ cally Chaucer's own ideological labor" ("Pilate's Voice/Shirley's Case," SAQ 91 [1992}: 806) or Sarah Beckwith's critique offunctionalist anthropology's tendency to "re-iterate the very clerical project it seeks to articulate," forthcoming in "Ritual, Theater, and Social Space in the York Corpus Christi Cycle," Representing Fifteenth-Century England(Minneapolis: Uni­ versity ofMinnesota Press). 24 CHAUCER'S LOLLARD JOKE texts are inherently evasive, and the investigator who wishes to learn more from a text than it cares to avow must sometimes treat its assumptions with a certain strategic disrespect. Far from believing that theory should apologize for introducing terms and concepts from outside a textual sys­ tem, I believe that the refusal of a text's attempt to dictate the terms of its own analysis is precisely theory's province and promise.5 This lecture catches me (as I hope all the events of my life will catch me) in transition, in this instance, between older and newer variants of historicist practice. Without relinquishing an interest in the text's self­ declarations, this variant looks to theory for additional contributions to historical understanding. Specifically, I want to solicit theory's support in addressing what a text leaves unsaid-not just what it means to say, but what it cannot know, or, especially, knows but will not or cannot say. Such matters are best pursued in terms of examples. My original inten­ tion was to cite a number of them. Naturally, the first and most incidental of them has expanded, and expanded, to occupy my full attention today. It involves one of the Pardoner's fluent and unsettling little jokes. This one is his passing jibe at gluttonous bellies and the cooks who labor to fill them, delivered early on in his spiel (PardT 53�0): Thise cookes, how they stampe, and streyne, and grynde, And turnen substaunce into accident To fulfille al thy likerous talent!6 My original, limited, point was that this joke has a Lollard implication that loses its zest owing to events beyond its control, with the burning of Sawtry in 1401. Mulling over this and many more observations about things this text can and cannot and will not say, I happened to see a recent and charming movie called Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould. I have decided to follow its example with "Six Short Lectures on Chaucer's Lollard Joke": 5 Because I am impatient with limitations on textual-historical understanding, I have no hesitationin answering a question that has surfaced in sevetal recent medievaldiscussions: of whether one can apply "post-Cartesian" models to "pre-Cartesian" systems. Although normally posed in terms of anxious solicitude and apparent indecision, this question seems actually to invite a negative answer. My own, affirmative, reply involves an assumption about textuality itself, pre- or post-Cartesian: that textual defenses need to be unsettled and that such agitation is precisely theory's task. 6 All citations of Chaucer's works are taken from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 25 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER I. A Text Has More Sources Than It Can Name7 I might seem to have stumbled with my first sally, since Chaucer's joke has a single and authoritative source well known to him and many peers, a source unnamed but effectively acknowledged by a tissue of close verbal borrowings.8 In his De miseria humanae conditionis (1195), Lotario dei Segni (later Pope Innocent III) launched a jibe against gluttons and their cooks, among whom one grinds and strains while another mixes and prepares, and turns substance into accident: "substanciam vertit in accidens."9 Given such close verbal correspondence, what might it mean to suggest that Chaucer's text cannot know its sources? Ifsource study as traditionally conceived were our goal, we could pretty much close the book on this one. But the straight-line transmission pre­ sumed by traditional source study simplifies a more cluttered process, in which words come trailing a riot of incompletely suppressed memory traces. Far from stabilizing a single meaning for its own terms, Cardinal Lotario's jibe already sits unstably in a crowded semantic field. Lotario's joke is founded on what Freud aptly describes as "the rediscov­ ery of the familiar."10 Already familiar to Lotario and his immediate audi­ ence offellow scholastics and ecclesiasts was the Aristotelian vocabulary of "substance" and "accident."11 Casting the activities of overingenious cooks in these newly fashionable terms is an instance ofthe pleasureful condensa­ tion common to all jokes, in which words and concepts do "double duty," and the hearer is invited to revel in a form of expressive economy. More specifically, the joke presents its knowing audience with a rapid double entendre, in which the same words are heard first as relatively empry (with an oddly laborious pertinence only to cooks) and then suddenly as very familiar and very full, drawing upon newly fashionable Aristotelian terms to describe food's essence and the external qualities by which it is per7 I am indebted toJudith Butler's deft formulation: "Every text has more sources than it can reconstruct in its own terms." See Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), p. x. 8 The relation between De miseria and this passage is indicated by F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 731. The supposition thatChaucer translated thiswork is based on his own assertion in LGW G 415. Although, as Robert E. Lewis has pointed out, Chaucer's translation of this work must be considered a probabiliry rather than a certainty, and the intertextual relation of De miseria and The Pardoner's Tale might have occurred in other ways. See Lotario dei Segni, De miseria condicionis humanae, ed. Robert E. Lewis, Chaucer Library (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), pp. 17-30. 9 Lotario dei Segni, De miseria, pp. 164-65. w Sigmund Freud,Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in SE, 8:121. 11 Lewis observes that the original work was dedicated to Lotario's fellow cardinal Peter Galloccia and that it represents an excited (if preliminary) immersion in the scholastic concepts of the day; Lotario dei Segni, De miseria, pp. 2-3. 26 CHAUCER'S LOLLARD JOKE ceived.12 This joke may also be "fuller" still, because in the course of the twelfth century these very terms had been employed with more and more frequency in a particular debate, over the nature of the Eucharist. But, if Lotario's joke is to be understood as eucharistic, his control over its signification already stands in considerable doubt. Within the eucharis­ tic debate these terms were already being deployed with varying meaning and divergent effect. In works like De sacro altaris mysterio,13 Lotario sided with emergent orthodoxy by divorcing the substance ofChrist's body from the accidental properties (bread-ness) ofthe consecrated host. But the issue had already been broached with the introduction ofthe grammatical terms "subject" and "accident" into eucharistic discussion, in the first instance by an eleventh-century grammarian named Berengar ofTours. Berengar insis­ ted that an accident and its subject were inseparable and that the bread of the Eucharist must therefore remain bread (with a figurative, rather than substantial, relation to the body ofChrist).14 This was an established argu­ ment with many participants, sharpened with the language of "substance" and "accident" from Aristotelian physics, before it reached Lotario. To the extent that Lotario's joke is incipiently eucharistic, it could actually cut in either of two radically opposed ways: these cooks who provide the butt of the joke by turning substance into accident could be either orthodox (in their belief that substance can be transformed, leaving only an accidental remainder behind) or heretical (in their obtuse overreliance upon the per­ sistence of accidents in the form of brute matter). Debates over the fine points of eucharistic theology were by no means settled by (now Pope) Innocent's own preemptive proclamation oftransub­ stantiation as official dogma in his Lateran Decree of 121515 or by the Thomistic synthesis later that century.16 By the end of the fourteenth 12 I am here reversing Freud's observation about the double entendre as words "full and empty"; Freud,Jokes, p.41. 13 E.g., "In sacramento corporis accidens non est in substantia, sed substantia consistit sub accidente"; PL, vol.217, bk.4, chap. 11, col. 863. 14 "Berengar, identifying form with accident, sees no real distinction between accident and subject and hence no separability....Later, when it was discovered that, in pure Aristotelian doctrine, the accident is not identical with substantial form, {they} could easily reason from this real distinction ofsubstance and accident to the{ir} separability"; Raymond G.Fontaine, Subsistent Accident in the Philosophy of Saint Thomas and in His Predecessors (Washington, D.C. : Catholic University Press, 1950), pp.34-35. 15 Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima co//ectio (Graz: Akademische Druck, 1961), 22:981. 16 Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Gary Macy's emphasis on "the tradition ofdiversity" in The Theologies ofthe Eucharist in the EarlyScholasticPeriod(Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1984). Other works I have found useful include R. W. Southern, "Lanfranc ofBee and Berengar of Tours," inStudies in MedievalHistoryPresentedto F. M. Powicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp.27-48; Fontaine, Subsistent Accident. 27 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER century at least three broad categories of thinking about eucharistic trans­ formation may be crudely differentiated: the heretical position in which the accidents of bread persist as a material remainder, joined after consecra­ tion by the symbolic presence of the body of Christ; the Thomistic com­ promise in which accident persists only as quantity after the ceremony of the altar; and the position of Duns and Ockham, in which the material accidents of bread were totally annihilated in the consecration, now to be wholly informed by the new substance of the body of Christ.17 Lotario's terms were thus borne to Chaucer within a wide and tumultuous discursive strearn.18 His and other reworkings of Lotario's joke had even less chance than the original to withstand divergent interpretation. If the concept of the "authoritative source" is designed in part to control subsequent mean­ ings, then Lotario's jest fails the audition. II. A Text's Meaning Is Subject to Events Beyond Its Bounds From its inception debate over the Eucharist was inseparable from consid­ erations of political power.19 In its later-fourteenth-century realization, the church and the secular arm would employ the relation between the sub­ stance of Christ's body and the accidents of bread as the crucial litmus by which the errant Lollard was to be separated from the orthodox fold. Lo­ tario's joke had been scholastic and only putatively eucharistic. In the heated controversial climate surrounding Chaucer's retelling, this same joke could not help but be perceived as eucharistic. Because of the wide use of its terms to discover and harass Lollards, its inherent multiplicity could hardly resist some degree of stabilization within a Lollard frame of refer­ ence. Suppose it to be a "Lollard joke," in the general sense of alluding to a 17 With apologies for the haste ofthis rough summation, I refer the reader co Macy, Theologies of the Eucharist; and Fontaine, Subsistent Accident; and also to David Burr, Eucharistic Presence and Conversion in Late Thirteenth-Century Franciscan Thought, Transac­ tions ofthe American Philosophical Society 74 (1984). 18 These voices are further subdivided in the climate oflocally intensified debate, when "substance" and "accident" became fighting words in a renewed eucharistic controversy: Innocent is alternatively seen as the irresponsible innovator and antichristus of Lollard condemnation and as the font ofeucharistic orthodoxy. See W. W Shirley, ed., Fasciculi Zizaniorum, Rcllls Series, no. 5 (London, 1858), pp. 383-84 (hereafter FZ). Berengar is both the contrite subject ofthe "confession" in which Wyclifsought a grounding for his views and the wild raver from whose dreams Tyssyngton claimed Wyclifroused his heresies. See Wyclif, De Eucharistia, ed. Loserth(London: WyclifSociety, 1892), pp. 30-31; FZ, p. 134. See also Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 286--87. 19 Cf. Rubin: "Power and aesthetics turned the eucharist into the battleground where the new vision ofChristian society would be won or lost"; Corpus Christi, p. 22. 28 CHAUCER'S LOLLARD JOKE controversy in which the Lollards were much embroiled. But what kind of Lollard joke, with respect to intensity and with respect even to its ultimate thrust? First, the issue of intensity: This joke had a fortunate launching, into the kind of invitingly "unset­ tled" situation in which Freud says that tendentious jokes fare best.20 Its likely period of composition and first reception-say, 1388-95-falls squarely within a mixed climate of opinion about Lollardy instituted in 1382 and ending with a jolt in 1401.21 In 1382 Courtenay replaced the murdered Sudbury as archbishop of Canterbury and the serious attack on Wyclifand his immediate followers began.22 During this year the existence of a secta consisting of Oxford theologians, itinerant preachers, and other local malcontents is suddenly advanced as a matter of common conviction. This is the year in which the Latin (though not English) epithet "Lollardi" was first employed.23 This is the year ofthe Blackfriars condemnation of Wyclifs views, the concurrent parliamentary attack on itinerant preachers,24 and the Oxford suppres­ sions. As part of this concentrated anti-Wycliffite campaign, it is the year of mandated church lections and orchestrated demonstrations against Wy­ clif and in favor of the Blackfriars condemnations.25 Knighton describes one such demonstration, a procession in which citizens of London walked nudis pedibus to hear an antiheretical sermon by a Carmelite doctor, fol­ lowed by a prearranged miracle in which Wycliffite knight Cornelius Clone (marginally, Clown) saw flesh and blood when the host was broken at the ceremony of the altar.26 2° Freud,Jokes, pp. 122-23. " In this spirit see Peggy Knapp's observation that, despite the condemnation ofcertain of Wyclifs views, the subversive content of his opinions remained undecided during his lifetime; ChaNcer and the Social Contest (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 63--67. 22 My argument in the remarks that follow has been conditioned by my reading ofH. G. Richardson's superb "Heresy and the Lay Power Under Richard II," EHR 51 (1936): 1-28. See also Margaret Aston, "Lollardy and Sedition, 1381-1431," Past andPresent 17 (1960): 1--44. 23 Knighton, Chronicon, ed. Joseph Lumby, Rolls Series, no. 92, vol. 2 (London, 1895), esp. pp. 178-89. Knighton uses the term "Lollardi" in his writeup of1382, but somewhat retrospectively, since his account may have been written as late as 1390. The term was, nonetheless,in use in 1382: Henry Crump, master oftheology, was suspended in mid-1382 by the chancellor of Oxford for calling Wyclifs followers "Lollardi"; FZ, pp. 311-12. 24 RotNli ParliamentorNm (hereafter RP), ed. J.Strachey (London, 1767), vol. 3, 124-25. 2 � See Herbert B. Workman,John Wye/if(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 2:271. 26 Knighton,Chronicon, p. 163. Workman identifies Clone as a courtier,pensioner ofthe crown, and frequentdebtor,saltilyobservingthat he seemsnot to have been "given either to lollardy or to seeing visions, unless they made for his own advancement"; Workman,John Wye/if, 2:272-73. 29 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Even more important for its bearing on Chaucer's joke, 1382 is the year in which belief in the consecrated host as accidens sine subjecto was instated as the sine qua non of orthodoxy. An Oxford inquiry in 1381 and the Blackfriars synod in 1382 took major roles in the process, apparently bas­ ing their condemnations ofWyclif's theology on a rather scattered enumer­ ation of his oral and occasional views on the Eucharist entitled "Conclu­ sionsWycclyff de Sacramento Altaris," and not (as is commonly supposed) on more formal works subsequently composed in his own defense such as De Eucharistia and Trialogus. Ninth on this list of conclusions is a rather scrambled claim that "accidens sit sine subjecto non est fundabile."27 Yet promoted to first and second among the views condemned at the Black­ friars synod, and promptly broadcast by Courtenay, was the matter of sub­ stance and accident: that the substance of material bread and wine remains after the consecration of the host ("Substantia panis materialis et vini man­ eat post consecrationem") and that accidents do not remain without a subject ("accidentia non maneant sine subjecto").28 Henceforth, and throughout the fifteenth century, this rather recondite distinction would be the crucial point of difference, upon which heretics were to be identified and, if they were lapsed (or, later, simply failed to recant), were burned. Despite such strong moves to consolidate an orthodox position, this remained a fractured field throughout the 1380s and 1390s, and even hostile accounts like Knighton's reveal it not to be single-sided. As he says in exasperation, the sect was multiplying so rapidly that you might hardly see two people in the road without one of them turning out to be a Wy­ cliffite.29 Furthermore, these Wycliffites were speaking up for themselves. The Michelmas Parliament of autumn 1382 saw a countermove, in which representatives of the Commons protested the previous session's statute against wandering preachers.30 Under accusation in that same year the Wycliffite preacher Swinderby thought it was worth his while to seek redress from Lancaster and the king.31 In the next decade Lollards fre­ quently took the offensive, as in 1395, when they nailed twelve highly assertive conclusions to the doors of St. Paul's and Westminster.32 These 27 FZ, p. 105. 28 Ibid., pp. 277-78. 29 Knighton, Chronicon, p. 191. 30 RP, vol. 3, p. 141. The king assented to the counter petition ("Yplest au Roi"), but the statute was never rescinded. 31 Knighton, Chronicon, p. 193; FZ, p. 340. The petitions seem ultimately not to have been successful, but one is struck by the optimism underlying the fact that they were launched at all. 32 Richardson offers evidence that they even sent a copy to the pope! Richardson, "Heresy and the Lay Power," p. 21. 30 CHAUCER'S LOLLARD JOKE conclusions represent a new order ofpolemic, deriding St. Thomas and the pope for trying to make a miracle out ofthe transubstantiation ofa chicken from an egg; suggesting that priests in secular office might be named hermofodrita or ambidexter; satirically suggesting that Judas's lips join the cross as an object ofveneration.33 Although indisputably orthodox, Rich­ ard II seems never to have been very interested in burning Lollards; even at the very end ofhis reign in April 1399, Lollard priest Sawtry hopefully (or at least spunkily) petitioned king and Parliament for a hearing on the Eucharist and other points.34 Yet an uneven but steady consolidation of the anti-Lollard position had continued throughout Richard's reign. A new note was struck in Roger Dymock's orthodox rejoinder to the Lollard conclusions of 1395, in which he ominously observed that Joshua destroyed idolatrous priests by burning them on their altars.35 This same menacing note was to be heard again in or around 1397, in a virulent petition to Parliament in which, with un­ precedented candor, the framers argued that in other realms those con­ victed of heresy were delivered to the secular arm to be put to death and their goods confiscated and asked that the same penalties be introduced to England.36 Two years into the reign of Henry IV came the event which translated the words of such tracts and petitions into deeds, constituting a terminus ad quern for any but the most mordant enjoyment of Chaucer's joke. By royal order to the mayor and sheriffs of London (an order which deliber­ ately outpaced and refused to wait a few weeks for parliamentary approval of the statute De heretico comburendo37), William Sawtry was publicly burned. As the Eulogium continuator described the event: During this parliament the archbishop ofCanterbury degraded a certain heretic, who had said that accident cannot exist without a subject in the sacrament ofthe high altar (accidens non esse sine subjecto in Sacramento Altaris et panem man­ ere}; who was burned at Smithfield.38 33 The Latin version appears in FZ, pp. 360-69; the English, in Anne Hudson, Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 24-29. 34 FZ, pp. 408-10. 3 ' H. S. Cronin, ed., Libercontra XII errores et hereses Lollardorum (London: WyclifSociety, 1922). The tendency ofthis debate to rely on crude stereotyping is exemplified by Dymock's absurd imputation that the anti-imagistic Lollards were somehow to be considered guilty of idolatry. 36 See H. G. Richardson and G. 0. Sayles, "Parliamentary Documents from Formu­ laries," Bulletin ofthe Institute ofHistorical Research 11 (1933-34): 152-54. 37 See RP, vol. 3, pp. 459, 466-67. 38 Rolls Series, ed. F. S. Haydon (London, 1858-63), no. 9, vol. 3, pp. 387-88. 31 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Launched and briefly at large within an "unsettled" situation conducive to humor, this Lollard joke's mirth---or at least any possibility of its innocent enjoyment-vanished in the smoke of Sawtry's burning in 1401.39 III. A Text's Meaning Is Held Jointly by Its Author and Audience The mixed political situation persisting until the end of Richard's reign would have permitted this joke to evade any of several different censor­ ships, and something similar may be said of the audience situation as well. Freud observes that the most propitious situation for a tendentious joke is one in which "the subject" (here taken as Chaucer and the members of his audience) "has a share."40 As a social phenomenon, the Lollardy of the 1380s and 1390s was drastically mixed-when compared, for example, with the first decade of the fifteenth century, in which it had found its constituency in the trades and a lord like Oldcastle was a distinct anomaly. It was so mixed that Chaucer's joke could hardly have been uttered before an audience in which someone did not have a share. A generally accepted account would have Lollardy experiencing a straight-line social devolution from the earlier 1380s (when its tenets were expounded at Oxford and it briefly enjoyed "pc" status) through the later 1380s (when it piqued at least some interest among the knightly classes) to the first decades of the fifteenth century (when converts like Oldcastle and holdouts like Thorpe were decidedly anomalous and when most members were in artisanal vocations). In the brief time available here I want not so much to unseat this account as to re-present it, together with a few words of caution. This account originates less in fresh modern evaluation of the evidence than in contemporary framing by Knighton and others according to hierarchical and "top-down" assumptions about diffusion and dissem­ ination. Knighton traces the promulgation of Lollard views from Wyclif to educated followers like Aston and Purvey to Lollard knights like Clifford and Stury to pseudopraedictores who spread their views to a populace forced by Lollard lords to listen to false doctrine even at sword's point.41 On the 39 Although, as DavidLawtonpointed out in his subsequent comment onthese remarks, the capacity of at least some segments of the fifteenth-centuty public for decidedly un­ innocent enjoyment ofsuch matters must not be underestimated. Hoccleve's wish that all those who believe as Badby did should be burned as he was (Regement 327-29) and his strident "RemonstranceagainstOldcastle"(especially lines 357-58) leavelittle doubt ofhis capacity to enjoy a good Lollard joke, the fates of Sawtry, Badby, Oldcastle, and the rest notwithstanding. I have chosen to present this lecture essentially in the form in which it was delivered; a revision or extension would devote more attention to the varieties of likely fifteenth-century response. 40 Freud,Joker, p. ll1. 41 Knighton, Chronicon, pp. 151-98. 32 CHAUCER'S LOLLARD JOKE other hand, Knighton's analysis is contradicted by his own sallies outside his argumentative frame, suggestive of a more diffuse (or, if you will, popu­ lar) origin for manyLollard views. He peppers his account with scandalous case histories, like that of "William [the} Smith," who launched his auster­ ities in displaced lust for a young woman and who discovered his own contempt for images by burning a statue of St. Katherine in order to cook cabbage; or William Swinderby, who tried his hand at every kind of hack religiosity (including popular antifeminism-until it backfired when women of his town threatened him with stoning-raillery at the rich, and hermitry) before joining Smith in his cursed chapel beside the local leper house.42 The social terrain ofLollardy was always less even than contempo­ rary polemics supposed, and fourteenth-century Lollards seem from the beginning to crop up at all points on the social scale. One possible point is the Ricardian household, and-given the overlap between those named by contemporary chroniclers as "Lollard knights" and the group of household retainers whom Derek Pearsall, John Scatter­ good, and others have placed at the center of Chaucer's audience-in Chaucer's own circle.43 Drastically summarizing a complex debate,44 I find 42 Ibid., pp. 182-83, 189-93. 43 See Derek Pearsall, "The Troi/us Frontispiece and Chaucer's Audience," YES 7 (1977): 68-74; V. J. Scattergood, "Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II," in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983); Paul Strohm, "Chaucer's Audience," L&H 5 (1977): 26-41. 44 Assertions about a close-knit group of "Lollard knights" (most of whom, like Clifford, Clanvowe, and Neville, were also associates and friends of Chaucer) were first advanced by the contemporary chroniclers Knighton (in relation to events of 1382) and Walsingham (in 1387 and 1395). First weighed and substantially discounted by W. T. Waugh, the same charges were more recently reviewed by K. B. Mcfarlane, who (augmenting them with several pieces of new evidence, including Neville's apparent protection of Lollard preacher Nicholas Hereford) found them to be warranted, with respect at any rate to seven central members of the group; see W. T. Waugh, "The Lollard Knights," Scottish Historical Review 11 (1914): 55-92; K. B. Mcfarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lo/lard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 139-226. Mcfarlane rather considerably overstates his evi­ dence; he argues, for example, that Clanvowe's protest that those who live meekly in the world are regarded as "lollers and losels" amounts to a "confession" of personal Lollardy" (pp. 205, 207); and in his effort to detect a Lollard voice in three of the knights' wills, he goes so far as to suggestLollardinfluence on Archbishop Arundel, Repingdon, and Henry N! But he draws closer to a more tenable assessment of the situation when he leaves offhis effort at proof and observes that English religious life in the later fourteenth century was charac­ terized by "the growth of moral fervour among the laity" (p. 224). This is likewise the conclusion of Anthony Tuck, who,pointing out the varieties of fervent experience cultivated by courtiers of Richard II, observes, "A wide range of religious attitudes is discernible at Richard H's court, from sympathy with some of the ideas of Wycliffe and the Lollard preachers among one group at one extreme to the patronage of the Carthusians among another group close to the king"; see Anthony Tuck, "Carthusian Monks and Lollard Knights: Religious Attitude at the Court of Richard II," SAC, Proceedings 1 (1984): 14961 . Both groups, he observes, were attracted to strong appeals to private religiosity, and such religiosity might be expressed in different, and even in superficially contradictory ways. 33 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER that the phrase "Lollard knights" is unquestionably overspecific and unwar­ ranted, but some aspects of Lollard moral fervor and interest in extra­ sacramental salvation seem to have found a sympathetic hearing in some court circles.45 This is a tonality captured by Knighton, when he says that these knights had "zelum dei . .. sed non secundum scientiam."46 It is a tonality since persuasively described by Anthony Tuck, who spoke to this same society ten years ago about Richard's courtiers' uneven embrace of various morally fervent spiritual positions, ranging from Lollardy to Carthusianism. The likely presence of some Lollard sympathies in Chaucer's audience by no means reduces, and may even enhance, a valence in which Lollards are twitted as obtuse and stubborn about accidents. By the same token, though, its audience situation confers a kind of "in-house" quality, one which does not deny a certain volatility to the jest but suggests that no­ body needs to be very discombobulated about it all. Not that the joke lacks a possible aggressive dimension; we have already seen in the burning of Sawtty where the discursive "othering" of Lollards might end. But its potential aggressivity seems to remain latent or unsummoned. JV, A Text's Form May Alibi for Its Thought To muffle, or excuse, aggressivity is not to banish it altogether, and beneath its wrappings the shifting center of this joke retains a considerable aggres­ sive charge. In fact, a symptom of potential aggressivity may be found in the very elaborateness with which its "Lollard thought" is screened from view. In the first place (and this is a point that would have been made much sooner in an earlier version of Chaucer criticism), this is not Chaucer's joke at all; it is the Pardoner's joke, ventriloquized, and as a literary character the Pardoner functions as a reservoir of unaccommodated hostility and intellectually superior scorn. A less resolutely historicist read­ ing than mine might simply see this joke as an epiphenomenon of charac45 Recall, in this connection, several pieces of debatable but indicative evidence that cannot be brushed away: Neville's keeping (and apparent protection) of Lollard preacher Hereford in Nottingham castle in 1387 and a writ to Sir WilliamLatimer in 1388 requiring him to appear before the appellant-dominated council with the heretical books and pamphletshe had in hiscustody. On the firstinstance,see Mcfarlane,Lancastrian Kings, pp. 198---99; Richardson, "Heresy and the Lay Power," p. 13; on the second, see F. Devon, Issues ofExchequer (London, 1837), p. 236; see also relevant discussions in Waugh, "The Lollard Knights"; Mcfarlane, Lancastrian Kings; Tuck, "Carthusian Monks." 46 Knighton, Chronicon, p. 101. 34 CHAUCER'S LOLLARD JOKE ter and bend its properties to augment our sense of it teller.47 In the second place, it offers us a decoy target or targets-not Lollards at all, but gour­ mands and bellies and overingenious cooks, and, at the next level of inter­ pretation, casuists and intellectuals. In the third place, and here I am quot­ ing from Freud, "The thought seeks to wrap itself in a joke because in that way it recommends itself to our attention . . . because this wrapping bribes our powers of criticism and confuses them. We are inclined to give the thought the benefit of what has pleased us in the form of the joke."48 The joke, that is, constitutes a witty wrapper that bribes its audience into an unquestioning acceptance of its thought. All of us got here by being, at one time or another in our lives, good readers, and one definition of a "good reader" is that he or she follows the instructions of the text. In this case, the text's implicit instruction is to relax and enjoy this fleeting joke--and then to get on with it (certainly not to postpone lunch for an hour over it). But I want to speak for the occasional importance of resisting a text's instructions-in this case, to push past the joke's screens, to refuse to be distracted by its teller or its immediate topic or its wit from the ramifications of its thought. V. Narrative Process Contributes to a Thought's Exposure This joke's aggressive thought is elaborately screened, but it remains sub­ ject to exposure. It lies at the boundary between the manifest and the latent, the conscious and the unconscious. Its topographical positioning within the utterance might be likened to that of the Freudian preconscious: consisting of unactivated knowledge and opinion, yet available-when at­ tention is directed toward it-to verbalization.49 My suggestion here is that the verbalization of this joke--its entry into language and, more spe47 Consider, in this regard, Freud's comment on the use of alternative forms of speech, including dialect, to shield a sequence of thought from criticism;Jokes, p. 108. Ifall the valences ofthe joke were ascribed to the Pardoner's character, then Chaucer's "shield" might be said to have worked. 48 Ibid., p. 132. 49 On therelations ofthepreconscious to the unconscious, and to theaugmentationofthe unconscious by processes of secondary repression, see Freud, "Repression" and "The Unconscious," SE, 14:147-48, 180--85. The particular historical circumstances of a text may be linked with secondary repression (ibid., p. 148), in which derivatives or local representatives of the repressed materials are likewise denied admission co the text­ although their situation in what might beconsidered a textual "preconscious" opens the way to their possible retrieval and verbalization; ibid., p. 191. See alsoJean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire, "The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study," YFS 48 (1972): 118-75. I am also influenced by Bellamy, Translations ofPower, pp. 38-81. 35 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER cifically, its implication within narrative process-reveals traces of its ag­ gressive charge. The revealing processes that interest me here are the heightened importance of the linguistic, the tendentious employment of comparison, and the unavoidability of temporality.5° The language of Chaucer's passage is at once backward- and forward­ looking. Retrospectively, it associates itself with Lotario, where the belly, for example, emits a horrible effiatus "superius et inferius"--above and below. With this we may compare Chaucer's "at either ende." Such inter­ textuality might seem a- or antihistorical, acting to defuse contemporary reference. But, at the same time, the language of Chaucer's passage asso­ ciates itselfprospectively with another, and specifically Lollard, verbal envi­ ronment, parodying the emergent language of bodily self-loathing (in which the "stynkyng cod" ofthe belly may, for example, be associated with the "stinking carrion" of the Lollard wills).51 In this "Lollard intertex­ tuality" both the specificity ofthe joke and its mocking intent are revealed. A mocking attitude toward the thought is further revealed by way of comparison-the preeminent device, according to Freud, by which the comic deflates earnest abstractions "of an intellectual or moral nature . . . {by} comparison with something commonplace and inferior."52 Here the Lollard theology of the Eucharist is mocked by comparison with the com­ monplace and inferior, with ostentatious culinary practice, even as the Lol­ lard host is ridiculed by subjection to the fate of all nourishing matter. Still more specifically, the temporal arrangement of the passage has the effect of dragging the Lollard theology of material accidents through the most humiliating narrative vicissitudes. Consider this larger segment of Chaucer's text (PardT 534-40): 0 wombe! 0 bely! 0 stynkyng cod, Fulfilled of dong and of corrupcioun! At either ende of thee foul is the soun. How greet labour and cost is thee to fynde! 50 Although I will not labor the point here, these are all key differentiations ofconscious from unconscious effects--effects, that is, that accompany the movement from the uncon­ scious to the conscious-within the Freudian system. See, in particular, Freud's comments on the attachment of words to things and the predominance of temporality in "The Unconscious," pp. 201, 187. 51 See, for instance, McFarlane's use ofsuch testimentary language as a litmus for l.ollard beliefin Lancastrian Kings, pp. 207-20. I want to thank Miri Rubin for pointing out the affiliation ofthe language ofthis passage with that ofl.ollard wills. 52 Freud,jokl(f, p. 210. 36 CHAUCER'S LOil.ARD JOKE Thise cookes, how they stampe, and streyne, and grynde, And turnen substaunce into accident To fulfille al thy likerous talent!53 The temporal effect of this sequence is to place the cooks at the service of the belly's command, which is to fulfill itself at either end, with noisy ingestion and noisy excretion, its proclivity being to tum food to dung. However transformed in appearance, by cooks and by the digestive process, the foodstuffs remain always and excessively material in their nature. The analogy here is with the Wycliffite-Lollard theology of the Eucharist, in which the sacramental bread remains bread in substance (even while it is relationally or by common consent regarded as the body ofChrist). These excessively accidental foodstuffs are a material residue, an obstinate and embarrassing remainder of the cooking process, even as the material and literal "breadness" of the Lollard host is itself an embarrassingly un­ transformed remainder of a sacramenral process. Thus, by metonymic in­ ference, the embarrassing remainder ofLollard theology, the Lollard "con­ clusion" itself, is dung, is shit. VI. The Text's Overt Antagonisms Protect Its Unconscious Center This is a possible stopping point, and I want to pause for a moment to explain why I am not stopping. I began by mobilizing historical materials to suggest that Chaucer's joke enters a period of social unrest that comple­ ments its own restless textual center. Now I have employed certain Freud­ ian formalisms (thus far of a nature as much tactical as theoretical) to suggest that, despite a permissive historical situation and the bribe of its risible wrapper, its "thought" is hostile to emergent Lollard theology. I want now to introduce a final argumentative turn, with the support of theory but also relying upon some modification of theory. My observations thus far have been based on the notion that the joke is the wrapping or envelope (or, in Freudian terms, the Hiille) and that the Lollard thought is its content (or, in Freudian terms, the Kern). But the relation between hull and kernel in Freud's system (or in any other system) H I am not so much interested in intent here as in textual effect, but I might note, as an indication ofpossible intention, that Chaucer here offers a rearrangement ofLotario's text, removing lines 534-36 from Lotario's chap. 17 and placing them ahead ofthe cooks ofhis chap. 16. 37 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER is notoriously unstable and, in this case, completely reversible.54 It can be suggested with equal plausibility (or, in fact, given the untuly nature of jokes, with greater plausibility) that the Lollard thought here finally func­ tions as the hull, or wrapping, for the vital center of this passage and that the kernel, or center, is precisely the joke itself, endlessly productive and limitlessly anarchic. At a last level of analysis--one which takes into ac­ count the joke's own unruly unconscious-the apparent thought shields all participants from an utterly blasphemous possibility. The unnameable scandal that threatens the center of this joke involves what Miri Rubin discreetly calls the fact of "undignified digestion."55 I have already suggested that the joke can actually be construed in two ways and that its alternative brunt-the brunt from which the anti-Lollard reading distracts us-is the orthodox view that the "breadness" of bread, its prior substance, is turned into sheer accident, to be replaced by a new substance which is the material body of Christ. Believing that Christ's body is the new substance of the host, the orthodox are exposed to a series of practical questions involving the mastication and digestion and excre­ tion ofChrist's body (not to mention derivative problems about what hap­ pens when a mouse eats the host or a maggot breeds on it). These issues were an endless discomfort for the orthodox yet caused no difficulty for the heretic, who believed in a symbolic rather than a material presence. As Wyclif himself exclaims in De Eucharistia: We reply ...that when such beasts are able to eat the consecrated host it is the bare sacrament and not the body or blood of Christ....Nor do we grind (conterimus}56 the body of Christ with teeth, but we receive it spiritually, and whole. 57 54 This point has been made with considerable persuasive verve by Samuel Weber, The LegendofFreud(Minneapolis: Universicy ofMinnesota Press, 1982), pp. 84--117. Disputing the notion chat the joke has a "proper meaning," stabilized by the hull-kernel relation, Weber argues in terms of one representative Freudian passage that "the outer garment of verbal play reveals itselfto be the inner nucleus ofthe joke, while the semantic material that usually makes up the interior domain is here only a f�ade. The prohibited game returns in and as this smearing of oppositions that are seemingly clear-cut"; ibid., p. 106. Weber elsewhere observes a telling mistranslation in the StandardEdition, in which Freud's "the best performances may use the most substantialthoughts as their guise" is rendered as "the best achievements in the way ofjokes are used as an envelope for thoughts ofthe greatest substance"; ibid., 89. 55 Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 25. 56 Suggestively rendered by Spinka as "crush"; Matthew Spinka, ed., Advocates ofReform, Libracy ofChristian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), 14:63. 57 Wyclif, De Eucharistia, pp. 11, 13. 38 CHAU CER'S LOLLARD JOKE Yet this very horror, of crushing or mastication, seems to be carried at an unacknowledged level in Chaucer's passage, when it continues (PardT 541--43): Out of the harde bones knokke they The mary, for they caste noght awey That may go thurgh the golet softe and swoote. Here Chaucer's passage distantly and derivatively acknowledges a blas­ phemy which was never far from its core.In its final and most devastating form this blasphemy is of course excremental, and the later Lollards would take it on a rhetorical and imaginative rampage.(Time will not permit full development of this subject, but I might note that the later Lollards were not loath to develop this excremental possibility in all its ramifications. Consider, for example, Margery Baxter's cloacal and extravagantly satirical vision of thousands of priests eating thousands of hosts and discharging gods into thousands of fetid pots.)58 Chaucer's text labors to avoid such blasphemy, offering the Lollard host as a target ofopportunity, a proximate safeguard against blasphemous con­ tamination of its protected center. 59 Resting at the joke's center, en­ wrapped and imperiled by the threatened blasphemy, is ...what? A thing at once sacred and social, crucial to the maintenance of late-medieval mon­ archy and the socially diverse but "graded " state; a conception of sacrally instituted and informed transformation, produced in and through the Eu­ charist alone.Earlier I suggested that the selection of the Eucharist and eucharistic remainder as the litmus by which Lollards were to be identified and disciplined was in some respects adventitious, that this was one subject among many possibilities on which Wyclif was rather arbitrarily "drawn." I want now, if not to reverse myself, at least to add an additional perspec­ tive, according to which the selection of eucharistic belief as the matter of contention may be seen as inevitable and unavoidable. The centrality ofthe Eucharist, its exceptionality, and its critical impor­ tance as a sacramental guarantee of spiritual and social transformation can �• MargeryBaxter, Heresy Trials in the Diocese ofNorwich, 1428-31, Camden Society, 4th ser. , vol.20 (London, 1977), pp.44-45. �9 AsJohn Mowitt says ofBarthes, "Ifone keeps in mind the methodological character of the text, then it is easier to see that Barthes has designed it around the tactical assumption that one can disclose the center ..., and thus make it available for criticism, by getting at how it manages that which the center construes as a threat"; John Mowitt, Text: The Genealogy ofan Antidisciplinary Object (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 121. 39 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER be illustrated in relation to Roger Dymock's rejoinder to the Lollard con­ tentions of 1395. To the Lollard insistence that absence of material change means that Christ's body cannot have entered the host, he replies that sacramental action constantly affirms and reveals the possibility of inward change without outward change: For ifthis {Lollard} argument should thrive, all the sacraments ofthe church, all the oaths of kings, and all political exchange should be completely de­ stroyed....I ask, what sensible change do you see in a boy newly baptised, in a man who has confessed, in a boy or man who has been confirmed, in consecrated bread, in a man ordained into the priesthood, in marriageable persons betrothed or joined? All receive a new virtue, except the bread, which simply ceases to exist without any kind of sensible change, and is transubstantiated into the body of Ci1rist.In what way also is the body of a king changed, when he is newly crowned, or anyone similarly advanced?60 Dymock offers us, in effect, a chain of sacramental signification, a chain that is effectively intact for the Lollard (who believes that every sacrament confers a new virtue symbolically) but for the orthodox contains a single discontinuous element ("the bread . . . which simply ceases to exist . . . and is transubstantiated"). The host functions for the orthodox, in Lacanian terms, as that point of irrationality which protects the entire symbolic sequence, the object which is always sought but presents itself only "in a form that is completely sealed, blind and enigmatic."61 An aspect of its enigma is its unique structural role, which is to function as pure significa­ tion (in effect, as accidens sine subjecto) and also as pure presence (the whole and entire body of Christ).62 Interestingly, the Lollard view does not even threaten the sacral (for it would make the sacrament of the altar coextensive with the other sacra­ ments in its symbolic function). What it threatens is the exceptionality of the host, its function as that point of irrationality that supports or (in Lacanian terminology) "quilts" the entire ideological system. In one sense the Lollard view threatens very, very little. As Wyclifand the Lollards were frequently to observe, it would have been perfectly orthodox as recently as 60 Dymock, Liber contra XII errores, p. 130. 61 Jacques La.can, The Seminar (New York: Norton, 1992), bk. 7, p. 70. 62 As Slavoj Zizekobserves ofthisprivilegedsignifier and sublime object ofdesire, "The element which only holds the place ofa certain lack, which is in its bodilypresence nothing but an embodiment ofa certain lack, is perceived as a point ofsupreme plenitude"; Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object ofIdeology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 99. 40 CHAUCER'S LOLLARD JOKE the twelfth century.63 On the other hand, by offering to dissipate the mystery enclosed in that one exceptional kernel whose irrationaliry guaran­ tees and protects the orthodox sacramental system, Lollard theology was threatening in the ultimate degree. The Lollard here functions, like theJew or the Muslim at other medieval social moments, as a symptom ofrepressed unease at and over the imagina­ tive center of the sacramental system. Like any other symptom, the cari­ catured Lollard works two-sidedly. Most obviously, the Lollard stages a problem for an orthodox but contradictory center. But, at the same time, Lollardy functions protectively, diverting attention from a center which must remain contradictory to fulfill its symbolic mandate but which must employ every kind of concealment to withhold its deepest contradictions from view.64 Conclusion I am, of course, speaking for rather than against the claims of history. The point of historicism as I understand it is not simply to assert the deter­ minative claims of history through thick and thin but to consider texts historically. One can think historically in more than one vocabulary, and without delimiting the questions, and without assigning each question a single answer. The provisionaliry oftheoretically abetted conclusions seems to me a source ofchallenge and excitement rather than despair; rather than encouraging a dismissal of the past, theory offers an opportunity to return to it with new analytical strategies and better-honed tools. 63 In, for example, Berengar's "confession," as dictated by the most orthodox party of his day, and to which Wyclif was perfectly prepared to subscribe; see Wyclif, DeEucharistia, pp. 30-31. 64 The sheer utility of the heretical Lollard to the support of later-fourteenth-century orthodoxy is registered in the refusal of the sacerdotal establishment to let Lollards offthe hook. Having been discursively framed as heretics, the Lollards were simply not permitted to extricate themselves argumentatively. Some of their self-justifying treatises possessed considerable persuasive and conciliatory power, as in their demonstration that their view of theEucharisthadprevailedin the church for nearlya millennium, beforetheintroductionof the novel and post-Aristotelian concept oftransubstantiation, or in their effective willing­ ness to create and subscribe ro a compromise view amounting to consubstantiation. But such reasonable arguments were of no avail, and the Lollards were progressively less and less able to extricate themselves from the position of a group chosen to fulfill an unreasonable need. Ideologically speaking, the later-fourteenth-century Lollard was beginning to func­ tion as an available antagonism which, in the Lacanian-Zizekian formulation, permits the symbolic order to conceal its own inconsistencies and hence to suture itself; see Zizek, Sublime Object, esp. pp. 11-53. This is the "irrational" kernel which, in its ascribed difference, must either change society or become society's victim. 41 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Take, for example, the Lollard joke. I have cultivated a considerable receptivity to multiple reference, undecideability, and, especially, the con­ stant instability of relations between what frames and what is framed. Reversing the relations ofhull and kernel, I have moved from a proximate and specific social target to a more general anxiety, touching on embodi­ ment, pollution, and irrational awe. But the fact that the joke contains sources of theological and social anxiety excessive to its topical reference need not diminish the weight or seriousness of its topicality. Whether the Lollard enters the text by virtue of a primary or a secondary process, the fact remains that the availability of the Lollard as a discursive screen for Ricardian social antagonism was to eventuate in very material and serious Lancastrian consequences. Nor is history---a somewhat more generalized or "late-medieval" variant---absent from the joke's core, in which a sacral mystery is afforded elaborate protection because of its indispensable sup­ port to a threatened social system. Let me return for a final moment to this matter of hull and kernel and its complexity and reversibility. I find a similar reversibility in the relation between historical texts and the theories by which we interpret them. No fixed or inevitable principle governs their relations: ifyou seek history, you need theory; if you pursue theory, you should want history too.65 65 I am graceful to Rica Copeland, Carolyn Dinshaw, Dyan Elliocc,Jonathan Elmer, Miri Rubin, and David Wallace for their commentary and advice. 42 ...