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The History of Literature
727 Earthly Paradise in Old French Verse (with Jacob Abell) | My Last Book with Victorian Literature Expert Allen MacDuffie | A Dueling Neapolitan Passionate for Poetry
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The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello everyone. The History of Literature Podcast is going on tour next spring. I'll be going with a small group of travelers to London, Oxford and Bath where we will visit the land of Dickens, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and more. A trip to remember. If you're interested in learning more about how you can join. You can check out the itinerary@historyofliterature.com or by visiting our partner at John Shores Travel. That's Shores without an E. Or just send me an email@jack wilsonauthormail.com that's J, A C K E. Wilson wilsonauthormail.com let's give ourselves something to look forward to in 2026. We would love to see you there.
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See mintmobile.com hello. Today on the podcast we continue our French tour with a look back in time at some old French verse. What did those medieval minds think about earthly paradise? An expert in old French literature, Jake Abel will tell us. And then we'll Hear from Alan McDuffie, expert in Victorian literature, about his choice for the last book he will ever read. Plus an anecdote about a dueling Neapolitan who cares very passionately about poetry. All coming up today on the history of literature.
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Foreign.
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Here we go. I'm Jack Wilson, your host. Welcome to the show. Are you tired of hearing me talk about the literary tour we're taking to England to marry? England in May of 2026? Well, I'll give you a break on that today. Let's just head to France. Though I will mention as an aside that there are still spots available. The information is in our show notes. Okay. On the way to France, old France, when heroes roamed the countryside and made their way into verse. The people were also deeply religious, Christian, and they wrestled with the stories in the Bible and what that all meant for the human and the soul. Adam and Eve was not a metaphor that was how human beings got started. It's right there in the Bible, in the book of Genesis. And so is Eden. And if you're an explorer, you have to wonder, just where is that Eden and what happened to it? Can we get there? Is it still a nice place? What does it mean for us that it exists and is maybe off limits? How might that knowledge or those visions affect how we treat one another here, where we are living? Speaking of how we treat one another, you probably know by now that I love thinking about literature and what it means for us and whether and how it can help us all get along here on this little rock. That's an awfully cold place sometimes. Planet Earth, no surprise there. It's a rock spinning within a void. And half the time we're in shadow and we're cold to each other far too often as well. But literature can give us a little heat, a little mental energy that opens our hearts for empathy and our arms for a warm, embracing hug, right? Well, sometimes it does. And sometimes perhaps not. Here's an anecdote that I read online. I have no idea where this comes from. It probably doesn't matter. It looks like it was clipped from an old newspaper or book. Based on the font, the typeset, it's worth passing along. Headline, anecdote. I love. I love headlines like this anecdote. All caps with the period afterwards. Maybe that you remember how. How magazines and newspapers used to have that when they had a little extra space they would just say anecdote or joke. Maybe the best use of this was Dorothy Parker. She was onto this. And we'll hear this with a forthcoming guest who reminded me of this one. Dorothy Parker wrote a poem. This was the whole poem. Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses. Which, by the way, affected my sister immensely. When she was young, she squinted for years, sometimes doing that trick of pulling down the sides of your eyes with your fingers, trying to refract the light into a shape. I guess that would let her read the chalkboard. And yes, it was a chalkboard or blackboard. And no, I'm not sure that whiteboards are better sometimes. Maybe my sister had actually modified the poem. She finally gave in and had to get glasses, although by then she was old enough to get contact lenses, so her delaying tactic worked in a way. But when she finally gave in and went to the eye doctor, he was pretty astonished. How have you been living like this? You could barely see. She came home dejected. And when I said, hey, glasses aren't so bad, I've had Them for years, with my eyesight. I think I had them in first grade, second grade. And she just said quietly, boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses. Now, isn't that better? Her version, Isn't that a little better to your ear than men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses? Maybe you have to read. Maybe I'm reading the Dorothy Parker lines wrong. Men. I read it as men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses. But if I read it as men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses, I don't know. I also like boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses, because boys. It's boys and girls, not men and girls. And I like. Don't. Instead of seldom, a little stronger. So it looks like we can improve Dorothy Parker in that sense, but here's what we can't improve. We can't improve the title of her poem, which is News Item. That's so good. That's so good News. Here's a news item. Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses. It conjures up that old practice of filling in a little column. You have a little extra space in a newspaper or magazine, so you have a little doodle in there, or a little squib of text, an odd fact, a saying, a proverb, a news item, or in this case, just anecdote. Period. And here's the A Neapolitan nobleman fought 14 duels to prove that Dante was a greater poet than Ariosto. At his deathbed, a confessor who was a great admirer of Ariosto desired him to acknowledge the superiority of this poet. Father, answered the dying nobleman, to tell you the truth, I never read either Dante or Ariosto. End quote. End anecdote. That is wonderful. That's the kind of reader we don't want to be. Of course, we want to read Dante and Arioso and then decide which we like better. Or maybe we don't have to rank them. Can't they both be good? How could Ario still win? My goodness. Dante. Sorry, Ariosto. Dante. Dante's second only to Shakespeare, if that. Well, maybe Emily Dickinson. My big three. Dante, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Hal Wordsworth, Keats. You see how hard it is to rank these Shelley. You see how hard it is to rank. So maybe we just read Dante and see what's there and what we can take from it. And we read Ariosto and Milton and Blake and all the rest, and we see what we can take from those poets, too. There's no need to rank them. Let alone fight 14 duels over them. But a part of me thinks, how wonderful that this Neapolitan nobleman was so passionate about poetry. How wonderful to even not to. Not to kill people. But how wonderful to even have this argument that accelerates and the swords come out. How wonderful to engage in 14 conversations that grew, that animated over poets and poetry. I'm glad we don't fight duels anymore. But I miss the days when poetry could arouse the passions in such an extreme way, and when it could arouse the intelligence and the spirituality and the thirst for knowledge and soul immortality. When it could explore these ideas and express them in verse. Which leads us to our topic for today. Let's hear from Jacob Abel about how this happened in France after this.
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At stream.espn.com Sign up now. Okay. Joining me now is Jacob Abel, assistant professor of French at Baylor University, whose research interests include medieval French quest narratives and more. He's here today to discuss medieval French literature and his recent book, Spiritual and Material Boundaries in Old French Verse, Contemplating the walls of the earthly paradise. Jake Abel, welcome to the history of literature.
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B
Thank you so much for having me. It's nice to be here.
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A
So we have a lot to discuss today, but I thought we could just kind of ground ourselves in medieval French literature. What years in particular are we talking about here?
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B
Right, so answering that question has to begin with some version of, like the previso that all medievalists give when they try to define their linguistic period of study. Right. Which is when we talk about medieval French literature, we're talking about literature that's written in diverse genres, in diverse dialects of this language across many centuries and as far away as the British Isles, down to the eastern end of the Mediterranean basin. So, you know, of course, medieval French literature is a really big sort of catchall term that is, you know, trying to include within its orbit this really diverse body of literature. But we can point to a couple of helpful markers, especially chronologically. So to get to your question directly on the front end, people who are in the sort of business of studying medieval French tend to think about the origins of the language in the 9th century. And this is typically identified with the so called Oaths of Strasbourg. This is a document, Les Sermons de Strasbourg, that, you know, I read with my students, and it's a pretty dry document. This is a brief sort of political document that's drawn up between two of three political leaders at a particular moment in the Carolingian empire. So the, the empire that Charlemagne establishes. And two of the three of them say, all right, we're going to gang up on the third, we're going to announce those intentions in this document. And they, they have to render this document in a language that's intelligible to their various armies. And one version of this starts to look a lot like what becomes German. And one version of this starts to look a lot like what's going to become French. But the so called French version of this is still looking a lot like Latin, right? It's, you'd be hard pressed to say, hey, look, this is French, but it's, it's different enough from Latin, right, that it has to be rendered in this, you know, different idiom. And so we tend to sort of look at that moment in the 840s as the beginning of Old French or medieval French. But we don't really get to literature in the sense that we tend to think about it, right? Imaginative writing and in poetry and prose until somewhat later, you know, there's this slow trickle of different texts, a couple of saints lives that trickle in. But the big explosion happens in the 12th century. And that's the moment where suddenly you have poets and prose writers across all kinds of genres, from epic poetry to the Lays of Marie de France that become written in the vernacular and specifically in this cluster of dialects that we call old Fren or medieval French. Two big folks that like, everybody's going to know, or a lot of people will know if they know anything about this period are Troyes, who's known for all the knights of the Round Table stuff. So, you know, there's a tradition of the Arthurian legends in England, but there's also this really rich cycle of texts that are written about all those knights and all that good stuff in French. And then you've got Marie de France, who I'm just obsessed with and about whom we know nothing, and she writes a range of kinds of stories, but she also is a translator and an adapter of a lot of material out of Latin. And that is worth mentioning here because a big body of so called medieval French literature are these really rich translations of materials out of Latin into medieval French. But by translation here, we don't mean word for word translation. Sometimes these are documents that are very creatively adapted and changed for all kinds of reasons, you know, to accommodate Christian theology, to just express the creativity of the writer, right? So, long story made short, when we talk about medieval French literature, we're really talking about this kind of explosion of writing across genres that picks up in earnest in the 12th century and then, you know, lasts for centuries after until we start to Talk about Middle French as a kind of evolution in the language.
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Before we get to the end point, I have a question about the beginning, which is what was happening then? Why was there this explosion? It seems like the language we know was around, but why did they start writing in that language? Was it, was it a change in literacy? Were there patrons who wanted to see this in French? Why not just keep writing things in Latin?
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It's a great question and I'll give you a couple of very short answers. The first is your question about patronage is spot on. So one thing that happens is you get different political leaders who become invested in the translation and adaptation of key cultural texts, particularly from religion and the liberal arts and philosophy, that ought to be rendered, you know, in their view, into the vernacular. And this is something that happens particularly in England. So, you know, as the, the sort of sparknotes version of the story, right, is that after 1066 when William the Conqueror, this upstart duke from Normandy in what's now northern France crosses the English Channel and successfully rests the English throne, he, you know, he crowns himself the King of England and in so doing makes England and eventually much of the British Isles into a Francophone place, right, into a place where, where French is spoken as well as English. And there's an interesting asterisk there to pursue about. For the longest time we thought that French was only sort of spoken by the royalty and aristocracy. Scholars like Richard Ingham have proposed quite persuasively in my view, that that's not the case. That actually if you look at business documents and other documents, you actually see evidence of a lot more diffuse sort of knowledge of French throughout social classes. But all this by way of saying, to answer your question, that there is all this patronage and you see that in The Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot, one of the three stories that I write about in my book. Because that poem opens with this Benedict, this you know, fairly anonymous monastic writer, sort of singing the praises of Queen Annelisa of Leuven, his, his patron, who's commissioned this, this story. We think there's some controversy there. But all this to just affirm your instinct that yes, absolutely, there's, there's all of this new patronage that's happening and it's happening in France, it's happening in French speaking England and it's even going to happen in the Latin Crusader states in the 13th century where you start getting translations into, of, of the Bible out of the Latin vulgate into French and other texts too.
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So was this like a sort of A gift to the people to say, well, let's write these things in the language that they're more comfortable that they speak and so on. Were they trying to nation build and say, well, the people who are speaking this language, that's who we want to get our message to. And we want to make it clear, you know, that it's sort of an us and them kind of thing. Or do we know why the patrons cared about this being in French rather than Latin?
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It's a great question. And you know, there's, there's different answers to this. So, for example, you know, I wish I could say that it was the case, right, that there was a kind of diffuse interest on the part of royals and aristocrats to make more literature and literary culture available for the masses.
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Yeah, right.
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That is often not the case. Right.
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Right, right.
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Would that that were the case. And frequently it's something almost closer to the opposite, where you have different kinds of lords and dukes in the feudal system. And I say that with all the asterisks there. We don't really talk about the feudal system in medieval studies anymore, but I'm going to use the term here for expedient's sake. But all this to say you get members of the aristocracy and the royalty who. It's a sign of their excellence, their wealth, their esteem, their sophistication. Right. To, to have this material translated for them in their courts for a dominantly courtly audience. Right. Not frequently for a popular audience. And so in a sense, this is, this is, this can get pretty in house. Right. You really have to wait until later to see more explicit appeals for things to be translated into the vernacular for a kind of like mass audience. Right. That does happen. That comes, you know, later in the Renaissance and beyond. Right. And obviously we get that in the Reformation. Right. A sense that we should be translating documents into vernacular languages out of Latin and Greek so that it can be comprehensible by as many people as possible. But in the case of the French Middle Ages, there's usually other more complex political things at work, not the least of which is this desire to sort of demonstrate the prestige of one's, you know, the cultural life of one's court.
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Okay, well, maybe we've spent enough time establishing ourselves at this point, so why don't we jump to the sort of the, the interest you had in French literature of this period in general. And also what gave you the, the impulse to explore this as a topic? The spiritual and material boundaries of old French verse and the walls of the earthly paradise.
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Yeah, and thanks for breaking down my unwieldy title there. I think I often, you know, tell my students that as you're. As a. If you're going to do research on literature of any period, serendipity is your best friend. And that was absolutely the case in this project. You know, I can remember exactly the drive I was making through my home state of Colorado, through the mountains, and I'm on my way to fly to a conference, and, you know, as a way of sort of passing the time and preparing for the conference, I crack open a copy of the Purgatory of St Patrick by the aforementioned Marie de France. And this is a text that's likely composed toward. In. In Anglo, Norman, French toward the end of the. The 12th, beginning of the 13th century. And I get to the end of this quest narrative that we can talk more about, in which, you know, a one Owen the Night sort of traverses through the. The horrors of Purgatory, which is located underground, you know, contrary to Dante's vision of it. And he gets to the end and he encounters these walls of the earthly paradise, and it's covered with these gems. And I was just struck by the fact that you get a very similar description of the walls of the earthly paradise covered in gemstones at the end of the earlier voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot, which is another quest narrative written 75 to 100 years earlier in 1125. And so this whole project just began with a kind of, huh, moment, you know, thinking, well, that's interesting. Why is this sort of sacred geography popping up again in this later text? And why is it described so similarly? And that led me down this rabbit hole of realizing, oh, this is. This is engaging with the biblical inner text of John's Apocalypse or Revelation, which is the last text of the Christian New Testament canon. And again, we can unpack all that. But suffice it to say, I got interested in this really by mistake. You know, I'd had sort of different interests in The Voyage of St. Brennan the Abbot, as a text, a very early text in Anglo Norman, and an interest in Marie de France and the purgatory of St. Patrick. At the time, I was working on a project about sort of claims of disembodied religious experience in different medieval genres. But it was only sort of bumping up against the similarity of those climaxes of both stories that I went, well, that's weird. What's that about? And so it started as a kind of philological question, just why is this description recurring? And, you know, a couple years later, that led to a book about questions of economic solidarity and Christian medieval ideals in the Middle Ages, about life with goods in common. You know, all these things I had no idea were implicated by that similar description. But that's where the problem is.
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Okay, so the, the first earthly paradise was Eden, right? And humanity lost that because of the sins of, of Adam and Eve.
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Sure did.
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And then is this where Eden went? It was walled off? Or is this a different location that we're talking about when we talk about the earthly paradise?
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Yeah, that's exactly the right question. So the earthly paradise is this kind of amalgam of different sort of cultural symbols that, you know, accrue to one another throughout Late antiquity and into the Middle Ages. And so, you know, it's exactly the case that, as you say, this starts with Eden, right? This, this image of the, the Garden of Eden that's described in the book of Genesis, in the Hebrew Bible and in the Christian Old Testament as this sort of ancestral home of humanity that's lost as a function of humanity's first sins, right? And as you get into the late antique world and into the Middle Ages, Christian writers, both in theology and in imaginative literature are going to continue to kind of tinker with this image, right, of the lost Eden and do different things with it. And they're going to kind of fuse this to a classical topos of like sort of Garden of love that's a more sort of secularized space of romantic love that's coming out of Ovid and, you know, other writers in the Roman tradition. And all this becomes a big soup. And one other element that gets involved here is purgatory, right, this sort of nascent idea that sort of creeps up out of late antiquity of a postmortem space in which Christians who stand to be saved, they're not damned, but have to do some sort of hard work first of sort of purifying their soul.
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Where would that be?
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Yeah, where would that be exactly? And so fast forward to Dante, right, and Dante's imagination in the purgatory. The earthly paradise is also at the conclusion of that narrative, which we could sort of call a quest narrative in its own way. But for him, he imagines the earthly paradise, right, this sort of walled off Eden that's at the top of the mountain of Purgatory. Again, you see an antecedent of this in Marie de France. She goes underground, she makes purgatory into this sort of more hell, like subterranean.
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Demons, they're being shown images of torture, and the night is seeing all that kind of stuff as he goes. But he's able to get by each of these scenes by saying the name of Jesus Christ. That's how he's making his way through. Right. So interesting. So I guess when I think about it, I never thought about this before, but part of the issue here, I suppose, is that it's kind of a. A loose thread from the book of Genesis. We hear that Adam and Eve are banned from the garden, but not that God destroyed the garden out of anger or anything like that. It's kind of presented to, I'm guessing, the medieval mind as well. That's still around. That must exist somewhere. Or for all we know, it exists somewhere. And there's still a lot of the globe that hasn't yet been navigated and seen and so on. And maybe this is a place that people could find.
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That's exactly right. And, you know, it's. It's always tricky, right, when you're studying any sort of, you know, culture from late antiquity or the Middle Ages to know exactly to what extent a given writer is representing this geography as some sort of journalistically empirical place that's out there, you know, that you and I might find and go to, versus a spiritual place, a mystical place. Right. A place that's encountered legitimately and really, but sort of in the interior life of sort of the soul's journey to God. And often it's some kind of, you know, mixture of the two or something more subtle altogether. But, yes, I mean, I think you're exactly right. As you say, this loose thread of Genesis has to be dealt with and is a really sort of fecund source of literary creativity. And the last thing I'll add to that is one other cultural sort of symbol that gets sort of latched onto this, and this brings us full circle to these texts, is the image of the heavenly Jerusalem at the end of Revelation, right, John's Revelation. And so we have these two images from the bookends of the Christian Bible, Old and New Testament, right? On. On the one side we've got the image of the lost garden, and on the other side, we have this return to a celestial city that's sort of imagined as the ideal community of the faithful beyond time, right beyond the Apocalypse itself. And that's why you get this kind of mashup of both images of the walls and gems of this heavenly Jerusalem, on the one hand, with this kind of paradise language of our lost ancestral home. And those things come together in these medieval French descriptions of the earthly paradise.
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Visit sodeliciousdairyfree.com okay, we're back. So Jake, there's a third text that you explore, the Romance of the Rose. Does that have similar gem studded walls of surrounding the earthly paradise?
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B
So the Romance of the Rose is the odd man out here. And I picked this to sort of complete the triangle of the book because I think there's both similarity and difference here in terms of what's happening in the slightly later text. So very briefly, the Romance of the Rose is a total medieval blockbuster. If you get people who don't know anything about medieval literature, they're likely to know Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, they're likely to know Dante's Divine Comedy, and they might know something about this old French, you know, Le Roman de la Rose or the Romance of the Rose.
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Yeah.
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B
And it's this incredibly long text and there's been, you know, so much ink, scholarly ink, spilled on this text. And I came with the very humble goal of really focusing on the first original portion of the poem, which represents the vast minority of its overall length. And that is attributed to one Guillaume Dolores William of Loris, who like so many of these medieval authors, we know extremely little and really nothing. And it's taken up later and the text is expanded quite a bit by a second writer who comes along later, several decades later. But this earlier original, unfinished text is penned, you know, sometime around 12:30. And it begins with this dream vision, right? So something like a quest. And this male dreaming subject comes up on the walls of this garden of delights. And what's interesting about that is you have all of these figures that are described on the wall, sort of representing different vices and virtues, that, while they're not exactly recapitulating this apocalyptic imagery that I see in these earlier poems, there's something striking and similar about sort of coming up to the bounded wall of this, you know, what comes to be characterized as an earthly paradise, but in a way that's much more keyed into that sort of Roman tradition I mentioned that looks at the earthly paradise as this sort of space of playful erotic love, right? This place where usually the male subject is sort of pursuing his lady love. And that's very much what's happening here. And so many people have written about the really problematic kind of violence that's in the rhetoric of this poem. And it's true. I mean, the sort of construal here of the male lover, you know, ruthlessly pursuing the sort of female object of love can be really terrifying at times. And that's all part of that. And so my focus really was just on this. This sort of framing device of the dream where you get these walls of a different sort of earthly paradise. Right. And my argument in that last part of the book shifts to how I think Guillaume Dolores is picking up on this older tradition from French poetry that he inherits, but is sort of starting to redirect this earthly paradise tradition in a fundamentally different, more secular kind of direction.
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A
Okay, so that starts to bridge us, because on the one hand, you know, a lot of what we've talked about could be kind of an interesting theological thought experiment, or I guess I would call hypothesis or something. The way I think of Dante, for example, is, okay, so there's circles on our way down to hell, and there's a mountain in purgatory and so on, and. And that's of interest. But your book goes into areas where it's also looking at notions of economic solidarity and idealized community and. And even gets into colonialism and the international refugee crisis and so on. So what. How does. Is. Is this the place to talk about that? How does the Romance of the Rose start to point us toward those ideas and are those uses of this concept? How do you get from here to there?
- [36:15]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So it's. It's interesting because working backwards, my argument is that the Romance of the Rose is. Is actually sort of that new direction. It's taking out is one that's moving away from these questions of economic solidarity, you know, which is something I identify much more strongly with those earlier two poems. Where am I seeing that? How do we get there? Well, a couple of ways. So first of all, what's interesting about the source material from John's Apocalypse, right? The image that starts all of this, right? The gates of the earthly paradise in these medieval poems is modeled on the, you know, the bejeweled walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, this idealized vision of community beyond all time. Well, what's interesting, and you know, biblical scholars have noticed this in their own domain of study, what's interesting about that image, and this is sort of rhyming with the idea of like, you know, the place where streets are paved with gold, is that these jewels, of course, are taken out of economic circulation. They're not signifiers of wealth.
- [37:12]
A
Right.
- [37:13]
B
If you're putting rubies and gems and sapphires in your walls, you can't spend them, you can't hoard them, you can't possess them as private property. Right?
- [37:21]
A
Right.
- [37:21]
B
At least that's kind of how they're functioning in that biblical image. John's Apocalypse is one big old indictment of not just excessive wealth, which is not the thing we tend to think about when we think about that biblical book, right? We think about weird obscure symbolism and judgment and a violent Jesus returning to the earth. And certainly there's, there's different dimensions of that there. But if you really pay attention to what's happening in the text, there is this again already well established in the scholarship idea that the text is really condemning the oppressiveness of wealth. And you see this in the kind of context of the image of the new Jerusalem as this place where, you know, gems, the signifiers of wealth are taken out of circulation. They're just beautiful esthetic sources of contemplation, right? And that's contrasted with the image of Babylon, who's the sort of decadent woman who is the, you know, bedecked in all of her gems and jewels that are ill gotten gains from, wait for it, her colonial exploits, right? So there's a way in which there's an anti colonial topos that's already active in the Bible there. And I make this case that, that if you understand that and you see how that's being imported by these French writers into these poems, it starts to just light up the rest of the poem and it makes so much more sense. And so very briefly, in the Brendan story, this is a story of a monk, saint Brendan of Ireland, who goes on this journey with a group of monks across the waters to find this mythical earthly paradise. Right. And he eventually does. And along the way, it becomes a journey about how he and his monastic companions learn how to dispossess themselves of goods in order to make sure that they're living in harmony with others. And you see this play out in a whole bunch of different episodes, but the punchline is, by the time we get to the walls of the earthly paradise at the end of the story, the biblical resonance there is. It almost feels kind of obvious. You go, oh, right. This has been a story about how these monks learn to take on forms of vulnerability so that they can be in deeper solidarity with each other by giving up forms of private property. And that's the image of solidarity that, you know, I argue that poem in particular is really all about.
- [39:31]
A
Right. Because I'm trying to think through this. So on the one hand, if you have, let's say, an impressive church, let's say it's St. Peter's or something, where it's. You go in and you're just dazzled. And you could say, on the one hand, the message there could be. Well, we know that this is the currency that's important to you human beings, and because it is. So we are going to use it in the service of worshiping God or paying tribute to the greatness of God that you'll never see anything in your life that'll be as dazzling as this. On the other hand, you could take a look at that and say that it's sending a message like, okay, you think you would be so impressed by seeing even one of these gems. What if we showed you so many of them that they no longer have the same kind of value, because their value comes from scarcity and rareness. And so we're going to kind of undermine that so that you'll see that what's really important is your spiritual journey and that, you know, the treasures of heaven are going to mock all of the. The aspirations and the striving and the covetousness and everything that is associated with these gems. And we're going to kind of set you up for that by saying, look, here's buckets full of gems. We have so many of them. We just use them the way you would think of a pebble or a brick. And so wipe that out of your mind. Yeah. So where are these three texts in terms of those two kind of polar opposites that I set forth there?
- [41:13]
B
No, I. And I appreciate that contrast that's really helpful. And I think that the Brendan story gravitates much more toward that sort of second just described.
- [41:23]
A
Yeah.
- [41:23]
B
You know, I have a colleague named Matthew Whelan who has pointed out in his discipline that, you know, if you look at certain kinds of late antique theological writings, right, in the medieval Christian world, one idea you find occasionally is this notion that there are sort of two good uses of wealth, right, where you can spend opulently. One is on the aesthetics of a church, the other is on the poor. And that's really interesting to me. And I think that in some ways it's that idea that sort of subtly telescoped into these medieval poems, right? Specifically the Brendan one in particular. Because to your point, I do think there's this way in which the story of this poem is really a story about these monks who learn through the course of all this trial and tribulation how to live up to the ideals of, you know, The Rule of St. Benedict, for example, which forbids private property. Right. This is a hallmark of monastic ideals, but it's a story about these monks learning that that's a lot harder than it seems. You know, when you wash up on an island and you're tired and nobody seems to be there and you see some sheep, well, why not eat one? And you know, it's Brendan that says, stop, right? Don't do that. Only take what you need to survive, because you don't know that this island is uninhabited. And to wit, they find out it is inhabited. Right. And again, you can already hear in that a kind of sort of awareness, right, on the part of the writer and of the story, of the need to be extremely vigilant in thinking about how your consumption, even when it appears to be, you know, perfectly unharmful, might actually have effects on other people. Right. And I think that's the kind of through line of that poem and the way that it's. It's trying to convey these monks toward a place where they can contemplate the walls of the earthly paradise and see it for what it is, you know, namely, to get back to your language, a place where gems are visible for all to see. And exactly that.
- [43:20]
A
Right.
- [43:20]
B
A source of sort of aesthetic celebration and nothing more. Right. Not something to be possessed, taken as private property, spent in markets, but something whose beauty is sort of sui generis and is also a reminder of the need to be extremely thoughtful about how any form of private property, you're never fully aware of the ways that that might be endangering somebody else.
- [43:45]
A
Now, is this an epiphany that they have, or is this what you're able to see based on kind of an analysis of the way that they act when they come into contact with these walls?
- [43:56]
B
Yeah, great question. And, yeah, it's much more the former. So this is something that I argue becomes almost obvious to the reader if you're sort of connecting the dots. But. But you have to connect the dots because to your point, it's not that they get there and they sort of spell all this out, Right. It's really this kind of string of pearls, you know, abuse the metaphor, you know, throughout the story, that just keep coming back to this theme of, you know, asking the question, how does possession relate you to strangers and people you don't know and maybe impinge on their flourishing? And so my argument is that when we get to this earthly paradise symbolism at the end, that's sort of bringing together and reactivating all those elements of the story without hitting us over the head. I think it's subtle in the sense that it's artful. It's not explicit, but it's very much present in the text in the way that it's sort of drawing together all these threads at the conclusion and the other works. Yes. So in the case of the. The purgatory of St. Patrick, something else is going on there. I argue that that's not so much a poem where the cash out is, oh, the earthly paradise is this sort of summons to radical solidarity, of dispossessing ourselves of property so that we can be sure that we're not abusing one another and living in this idealized form of material community. I think Marie de France is doing something a little different, but with the same kind of imagery. I think the tree she's barking up has much more to do with sketching out an idealized form of spiritual community. What does that mean? Well, in the climax of this story, when Owen the knight gets to this early paradise, he comes in. What's in the earthly paradise? Well, unlike in Brendan's story, it's populated by all these sort of ghostly shades of Cistercian monks and clergy. And, you know, they sort of tell our protagonist, Owen, what's going on. They give him a kind of theological lesson and what this earthly paradise is, how he can hope to come back there after he dies. And then there's this big sort of epiphany moment where out of the sort of further paradise, right, in which God dwells, in God's fullness, comes this amazing light of the Holy Spirit that comes and penetrates the heads of everyone that's there. And, you know, without belaboring the details, I. I get into other sort of Cistercian spiritual writings of the period that talk a lot about this monastic goal of sort of shared spiritual experience of coming to love one another so well that the brothers, the monks, are sort of united in their hearts and their spirits together. And the Holy Spirit as the third person of the medieval Trinity is sort of the. The big symbol, right? The actor that's seen as bringing this all together. So it's still this focus in Marie de France's story on an idealized vision of community, but that sort of shifted over to the world of spirit, of affect, rather than the sort of focus on material culture.
- [46:50]
A
Right, okay. And then the Romance of the Rose.
- [46:55]
B
Yeah. By the time we get to the Romance of the Rose, it's just all about love. And by love, I mean romantic love. That's why I call this part of my book, you know, something like, you know, the Apocalypse that never was. Right. Because there's. There's a way in which William of Loris story. It's not really trafficking anymore in this sort of older, about a century and less effort to use the earthly paradise as a symbol that. That gets us to think about sort of idealized forms of religious community. You have a lot of the same sort of aesthetics that are happening. And again, my argument is, I think anybody who was in a reading culture in the old French world, who's reading the Romance of the Rose, I think so many of those people would be seeing the signpost. They'd be thinking back to, oh, yeah, this is kind of like what happens at the end of the Purgatory of St. Patrick. Or this is kind of like what happens at the end of the voyage of St. Brennan, the abbot. Except this is all about some guy and how incredibly passionate he is about, you know, pursuing his erotic desires. And in fact, he's. He's willing to do this in a way that seems kind of precarious and violent at times. Gone is any of this emphasis on community.
- [48:03]
A
Right.
- [48:03]
B
And on the quest as a way to sort of enjoy in yourself into these shared forms of community, whether that's imagined in more material or spiritual terms. That's not to say that there's. There's not this huge multiplicity of figures in the story, but for one thing, they're all pretty fiercely allegorical. Right. You have all these vices and virtues that converse as people with. With the dreaming subject of the Romance of the Rose. So they're not fully personified. Right. The very real people that are encountered in these earlier religious poems. And that's not me trying to sort of rake William of Loras over the coals. I'm not trying to like moralize here. It's just really interesting to me that in this sort of third later poem that's trafficking in a lot of the same symbolism, he's just striking out in a really different direction. And if anything, that's a testament to his genius and the way that he was able to sort of redirect this older culture, even as I think it does cards on the table, you know, lose something in terms of the way that it's no longer focused on this, I think, really compelling idea that you get in the Brendan story about sort of economic solidarity.
- [49:07]
A
Right. And it's also the one that was the equivalent of a bestseller in its day.
- [49:14]
B
That's right, that's right.
- [49:15]
C
Yeah.
- [49:15]
B
If I had my way, the voyage of St Brent and the Abbot would be the one we'd all be talking about.
- [49:19]
A
Well, okay, let's talk about ourselves because as we are learning about this medieval French literature and the three different approaches that you're talking about, as we see over time, and you've explained kind of why they would be regarding the walls of the earthly paradise in these three different ways. Which of those ways do you think has the most resonance for us? I mean, are we just time traveling and. And saying, isn't it interesting how they thought about things or do you see connections with the way we might approach similar questions and how we might try to solve those problems?
- [49:59]
B
Yeah, I think, and I hope that the last part of my book invites people to address this exact question head on because I'm less interested in just making sort of arguments about the past for its own sake. And I'm much more interested in how we can engage these literatures in ways that can meaningfully contribute to contemporary questions in ethics and politics, in our real embodied lives, you know, in the 21st century. And I'll say that the thing that becomes the point of comparison for me is the fact that when you get to the early modern period, the architects of the colonial era, people like Christopher Columbus, explicitly frame their colonial exploits in the so called new World as a desire to find and subjugate an earthly paradise. Right. So this symbol, you know, which as we've talked about, you know, has these biblical origins, it becomes sort of conjoined to these different, you know, Roman images from classical antiquity. It has this afterlife in the Middle Ages. Well, something Else happens that goes off in an even different direction in the early modern period. And suddenly the earthly paradise becomes this quasi biblical cultural symbol that helps to orient and justify the violence of colonization. And that's a really brutal and violent afterlife. And so part of my argument is if we key in, particularly on the Brendan story, we see an earlier tradition that has not yet been pressed into the service of these really terrifying and disturbing colonial projects. In fact, we see something like the opposite. Because I think, again, the story of Brendan is really a story about people who are. They're on this maritime journey, they're making ported islands. They're at the mercy of the hospitality of strangers. They become something like refugees themselves. But even so, they have to learn this journey of how to sort of take and receive in ways that won't imperil others, even unseen strangers. And I think that's a profound lesson for our time. In a moment when the precarity of so many people around the world is tied to the refugee crisis and is explicitly the result of the very colonial projects we're talking about. I think that recovering a story like the voyage of St. Brendan can help to do a few things. First, it can show us that this really heinous vision of the earthly paradise from the 1500s, that wasn't always the only one, right? It doesn't have a monopoly on the cultural value of that symbol. And two, we can then go back and sort of play around in some of these. These older visions of the earthly paradise and find ways of recovering literary cultures that help us in our own time to think about our own social location. What is our response to people who wash up on our shores and need hospitality? And what kinds of questions do we ask ourselves as individuals, as groups, as nations, when we think about how we are buying, selling, trading resources and the sort of effects on unseen strangers that I can't see of the acquisition of those goods, that property. So that's the sense in which I think all of these stories, perhaps most acutely, the Brendan story, are intensely relevant for us to think through those all too important problems in our own time.
- [53:20]
A
What moral blind spots do we have when it comes to wealth? And how do we. How do we manage? How do we accept ourselves and our souls and our spirits, even as we go about trying to accumulate that wealth?
- [53:34]
B
Yeah, very well said. I would just add to that that, you know, I think that what these stories can do, what the Brendan narrative does for me especially is it also challenges me to think about how our acts of possession and the taking of Things, even things we need for our survival have again effects not just on sort of human strangers or communities we know, but on other than human subjects too.
- [53:59]
A
Right.
- [53:59]
B
I mentioned Paul the hermit, this figure who lives in this kind of symbiotic relationship with this otter, this otter who's very human like and helps this monk to survive. And the monk in turn has all of this praise to give to the otter. Thanks and gratitude. So that's just one thing I tack on here is I think this poem also expands our awareness of animal, plant, elemental communities that we, we share the planet with and how our effort to harvest resources for our survival and thriving also impact the otters, the sheep, the water, the various other than human subjects that, that we share the planet with.
- [54:36]
A
Well, that is a great place to end. But before I let you go, I wondered if you could just give us a. A quick overview of your obsession with Marie de France. What is it about her and her works, the works attributed to her, that has got you so interested?
- [54:56]
B
Yeah, thank you. I, you know, I get asked this question almost never, so this is a great opportunity to get to talk about that. You know, I am so indebted to a range of professors who first made me aware of Marie de France when I was an undergrad. And I'm thinking especially of Sarah Jane Murray, brilliant scholar of old French, Philip Donnelly, Rob Miner, who all team taught a course, a kind of literature survey course that I took as an undergrad. And the first thing we read was the prologue of the Leis of Marie de France, where she develops this really brilliant theory of literary interpretation in just a couple dozen lines. Right.
- [55:34]
A
And.
- [55:35]
B
And so before we even got to her stories, I just became sort of ensorceled by the intellectual brilliance of this woman about whom we know nothing, and the way that she was framing literature. She describes it in this prologue, as she says, you know, the ancients were aware that literature was something that you had to peel back the layers, but you also had to. It's often translated in English as it was the job of the reader to put the finishing touches to their meaning, you know, and right. In that statement is included all of sort of postmodern hermeneutical theory. All this idea of, look, the meaning of the text isn't just sort of fixed, finished and done down there. Something that has to be completed and evolved through the interpretation of the reader. Right. And in that way, Marie de France brilliantly describes this vision of reading, not just writing, where she gives her work to the future. Right. To become relevant to future Contexts that she can perceive in her own time. Right. So that's really the origin story of my obsession with. With her and her work. And it only grows over time.
- [56:35]
A
Yeah. Sounds like I'll need to do an episode on her.
- [56:38]
B
Yes.
- [56:39]
A
Okay. Well, this book is called Spiritual and Material Boundaries in Old French Verse, Contemplating the Walls of the Earthly Paradise. Jake Abel, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [56:50]
B
It's been such a pleasure. Thank you for your time.
- [56:58]
A
Hmm. That was Jake Abel. And finally today, a my last book. Alan McDuffie was here to talk about Charles Darwin and cataclysmic change and the way that Victorian writers took all of that in. And after that, I asked him a special question. Okay. We're joined now by Alan McDuffie, author of Climate of Darwin, Climate Change and the Literature of the long 19th century. Alan, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [57:49]
C
Okay, wait, so can I ask you a question?
- [57:51]
A
Sure.
- [57:53]
C
Do I know it's the last book? I mean, do I sit down and think, like, okay, this is it. I'm going to finish this book? And then. Because in that case, I'm going to pick a long book.
- [58:02]
A
A long one. Yeah, right. I guess. Well, let's set that aside, you know, but it doesn't necessarily prolong your life, so you.
- [58:15]
C
Well, I mean, the book, I would have picked it anyway, but I think it has to be Proust In Search of Lost Time, and not just because it's going to keep me alive longer.
- [58:28]
A
Right.
- [58:29]
C
I first encountered Proust in graduate school, and I just found it the most profound and deep and rich and funny and surprising absorbing thing I'd ever read. But I also found it to be a book that you have to really focus on. Like, really. It's demanding as wonderful it is. And so I started reading it in graduate school, and then I got busy with my dissertation. I had to put it aside. Then in 2013, I picked it up again and I started again. And then not too long after that, my first daughter was born. And after that, I didn't have time to.
- [59:10]
A
Yeah. You know, even get through a sentence.
- [59:12]
C
Like, watch a whole movie, never mind read proofs, you know, and then the same story happened again to me during the pandemic. Tried it again. And every time I would do this, you know, I would open it up and think, well, it's been too Long. I can't just, like, find my bookmark and keep going.
- [59:29]
A
Yeah. Yeah. I have to start over.
- [59:31]
C
Yeah. It gets fuzzy, you know, and so it was a little bit like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill. Like the most pleasurable boulder rolling that you could imagine. So. But anyway, it is a kind of goal of mine in my life at some point to read all of it and just. And I think it'd be fitting as the last book, to sort of totally lose myself in this kind of epic magisterial work.
- [59:55]
A
Oh, it will be. So you haven't finished it?
- [59:57]
C
No.
- [59:58]
A
Okay. So you do have a. It is a perfect choice for you because it. And the way that. I mean, all of the early books, they made me want to live and want to experience life, and it made me look around and see things more clearly and to. And I wanted to invest more in the experiences I was having because I was thinking, this is. Here's a guy who clearly was going through life with his eyes wide open, and he was so sensitive to everything around him and all of his sensations and. And sometimes it seems like he doesn't even have a skin. He's just nerve endings. The way that the world would operate on him and the way he would feel things so hard. And so it really made me want to travel and want to see things and do things. But then when he comes around to the last book and he's looking back, and I won't spoil it for you or for other listeners, but it really does. It kind of takes that part of it away, and it kind of gives you a new sense of looking back at your life and looking back at memories and the passage of time and the way that things have recurred and the way new understandings have replaced old understandings. And it kind of gives all of that a sort of meaning. But you couldn't just jump to the last book and try to get that from it. You do have to kind of earn your way there by reading all of the books, because it talks about all the things that you've read about. And you're right that it would be hard, once you've kind of forgotten everything, to pick it up later. Because they're not standalone volumes, they do bring in a lot of the prior. But it is. I think it would be the perfect way, if you're enjoying Proust, to kind of use that as the reflection on your own life and your own memories and kind of the way time has passed during the period when you were here on Earth.
- [62:12]
C
Oh, my God. Jack, you're making me want to read it right now. I mean, I like, I want to go upstairs and get it, but I feel like it's going to be. I've got such a busy few months coming up that I know that, you know, I'll read it and it'll happen all over again. But it was beautiful the way you described it and I've got it. I'm looking forward to reading and I think it's going to be just amazing.
- [62:35]
A
Good. Well, also I'm getting to the point where my kids are. One is in college and one is finishing up high school with another year. And it is something that I don't think I could have tackled when my kids were younger. Because of that, I had a hard time even finishing a newspaper article or something when they were really little. You do need to have the, the time carved out to be able to devote yourself to it. But hopefully you will get there soon and be able to tackle it and get to that peak of that mountain that I just kind of described.
- [63:17]
C
Yeah, well, I've got a 10 year old and a 2 year old, so it'll be a while, but I'll have something to keep my eye on when they get a little bit older.
- [63:27]
A
That's right. And bedtime reading, or your own bedtime reading too, if, if you can put away the phone and give yourself over to a book, maybe that's a way to tackle it. I know my friend Mike has done it as a slow read with a lot of other people on Twitter where they did I think 10 pages a day and he found that to be quite rewarding. So I know it can be done, but I just know that for me it was always with those long sentences and just having to have the kind of concentration. I didn't have any kind of reading like that in me when my kids were quite young.
- [64:04]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think by the time it's bedtime, I'm usually, I'm pretty fried, you know, and I like my powers of concentration are all but gone at that point. So. Yeah.
- [64:17]
A
Okay. Well, that is a wonderful choice. Alan McDuffie, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [64:24]
C
Yeah, great, thank you. Thanks for having me.
- [64:26]
A
Foreign that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Alan McDuffie for joining me and to Jake Abel. Wonderful conversations with both of those two gentlemen scholars. We'll be back soon with some Mark Twain, some Dostoevsky, some Susan Glassbell, some Johannes Gutenberg, some Mel Brooks. John Keats, Samuel Pepys, and more. I hope you can join us for all of that. Remember that you can check out our roadshow@historyofliterature.com or johnshorestravel.com don't miss out on the May 2026 tour of literary England with me and other distinguished literary guests. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [66:01]
B
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