7 - Games People Play: Gender and Dialogue in Fairfax 16

Summary

Scholars generally agree that some texts in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Fairfax 16 were meant to be read in an atmosphere of lighthearted play. Nicola McDonald, in 2006, suggested that the “ludic” social context evoked by Ragman's Roll and The Chaunce of the Dice offered opportunities for women to enjoy raunchy, suggestive games. Alistair Minnis compared Chaucer's Legend of Good Women to Castiglione's Il Cortegiano, which treats mixed-gender debates about the dignity of women as a recreational device by which men escape the cares of the real world – “rather than as a confrontation of the problems which women actually experience in their lives.” Florence Percival in 1998 suggested that the manuscript context in Fairfax 16 should encourage us to read Chaucer's Legend of Good Women as a lighthearted debate poem enjoyed by a mixed-gender audience accustomed to engaging in irresolvable medieval debates and what Percival calls “gender-based sparring.” Responding to Percival and Minnis, Betsy McCormick argued that the debate about women, to which the Legend of Good Women belongs, was itself a literary game.

All of these treatments of Fairfax 16 and its texts as ludic owe a substantial philosophical debt to John Stevens's argument that late medieval readers treated courtly love as “a manly display of social virtues where women can admire them…In this game (part imaginary, part real), people acted out their aspirations to a leisured and gracious life.” Poetry is a tool for the construction of courtly masculinity:

The discipline and delight of being a Lover, whether in ‘ernest or in game,’ would teach you how to behave – especially in mixed company…I want to amplify the suggestion that the courtly love-lyric is, perhaps before all else, a tool in the game. Poems purporting to be about the intimacies of joy and grief encountered in the Lady's service are made the occasion for social play, for social display and ultimately for social entertainment. (208–09)

He emphasizes the formulaic, performative nature of late-medieval courtly poetry as “a public utterance which had, or at least pretended to have, a private meaning.” For Stevens, because dissimulation is intrinsic to the performance, sincerity is never expected: “We must remind ourselves that between the Lover-as-Poet, to whom words are a mere tool in the ‘game,’ and the Poet-as-Lover, to whom the ‘game’ is an excuse for making poems, the emphasis shifts subtly but markedly.”