V - The Sacred and the Secular: Alchemical Transformation in The Turke and Sir Gawain

Summary

The conflation of the sacred and secular in Arthurian literature proves arresting, complex, even troubling. For years this tension has intrigued and frustrated academics, ranging from the Robertsonians, with their tendency towards religious interpretation, to those they infuriated. Barbara Newman writes that ‘the last frontal assault on that topic dominated the field for thirty years until, after long and furious debates, scholars turned away in sheer exhaustion’. Newman reopens this debate by providing a handful of useful tools when considering the sacred in medieval literature, recommending inclusive approaches that do not neglect one reading in favour of another. In a like-minded spirit, the following discussion considers a little-known late medieval romance, The Turke and Sir Gawain, and how, at the moment of supernatural transformation, the text deliberately inserts emphatic religious language, resulting in an unlikely juxtaposition of the sacred and the secular.

Medieval romance frequently focuses on narratives of testing. This can occur in a variety of ways – through exterior performance of chivalric duties, such as accomplishing feats of arms to increase knightly prowess or in upholding proper conduct towards ladies. However, romance narratives of testing also elicit a knight's interior qualities, such as his thoughts, morals or spiritual inclinations. An example of testing a knight's interiority may be seen in the Grail Quests, such as that which is found in the Vulgate La Queste del Saint Graal when Gawain finds no aventure because he remains unrepentant. When Sir Meliant is bested in a joust, his nearly mortal wound is not merely the result of his inexperience: the hermit who tends him reveals that this wound was inflicted as a result of Meliant's presumptuous pride in taking the left-hand fork, although Galahad advised against it. Exterior performance of aventure can function to display a knight's moral character and may provide the means by which a knight's interiority is displayed.

This idea of testing a knight's interior virtue morality is seen throughout the Gawain romances in the Percy Folio. This seventeenth-century collection of ballads and romances was owned by Thomas Percy, who discovered it while visiting a friend. On the cover of the folio Percy scribbled, ‘I saw it lying dirty on the floor, under a Bureau in [the] Parlour: being used by the maids to light the fire.’