The fourteenth-century Middle English poem known as The Castle of Love is a translation of an earlier poem, Le chasteau d’amour, written in the first half of the thirteenth century by Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1168–1253) in Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French spoken in England. Its status as a translation does not imply the Middle English poem is an inferior “copy” of a superior “original,” however. Every translation is necessarily an adaptation that reflects the interests and needs of its own translator and audience. The Middle English poem is a skillful translation close to the Anglo-Norman source that nevertheless manifests in its gaps and expansions, its restructurings and additions the interests of its own audiences and moment. The version of the poem preserved in the Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1), which forms the base text for the first 1514 lines of this edition, includes a brief incipit that identifies the work as “a tretys” called “Castel of Love,” which “Bisschop Grosteyzt made.” This little introduction deploys Grosseteste’s name as if he were the direct author of this Middle English version; in contrast to many English translators’ prologues, the narrator does not admit the poem has been translated. For the audiences who consumed this text, then, this was the original.

Grosseteste was an important English theologian, philosopher, scientist (natural philosopher), translator, and writer active in the first half of the thirteenth century. Not much is known about his early life, but he was born in Stowe, Suffolk, and his family was poor. He may have spoken English as his native language, or Anglo-Norman; in any case, he was fluent in both languages. Although he came from a poor family, he was educated in theology (probably in Paris) and served as chancellor of Oxford (between ca. 1214 and 1221), where he also taught theology. He was a deacon by 1225, became archdeacon of Leicester in 1229, and began teaching the Franciscans at Oxford in 1229/30. He was ordained bishop of Lincoln Cathedral in 1235 and died in October of 1253.

Although Grosseteste was a conservative theologian who held traditional views, his works came to the attention of John Wycliffe in the 1360s, and they became embroiled in Wycliffite controversies in the fourteenth century because of Wycliffe’s admiration of them. Like Grosseteste, Wycliffe was part of the clergy, as well as a philosopher and theologian who taught at Oxford University. Unlike Grosseteste, Wycliffe was also a reformer and dissenter — a kind of proto-Protestant — whose use of Grosseteste as an authority in his own writings was often at odds with the views Grosseteste himself espoused. As R. W. Southern explains, Wycliffe’s Civil Lordship both makes “legitimate elaborations of Grosseteste’s argument” and implies “support for a further step which Grosseteste did not take,” a move made possible in part by Grosseteste’s own “open-ended methods of argument — his invitations to readers to make their own additions.” Jim Rhodes suggests this “open-ended” style particularly characterizes the Chasteau, whose “fictionality, that is, its use of poetic analogies and devices, encourages readers to interpret and evaluate events in their own way.” Ultimately, the admiration Wycliffe and his followers the Lollards had for Grosseteste turned Grosseteste into a household name for the dissenters, as even less-well-read preachers made use of a repertoire of Grosseteste quotations to bolster their own rhetoric. This popularity among the Wycliffites also led to the proliferation of copies of Grosseteste’s works in the fourteenth century and was probably responsible in some cases for a large number of surviving manuscripts.

Grosseteste was a prolific writer of vast breadth. Most of what he wrote was in Latin, but there are a few works in Anglo-Norman besides the Chasteau attributed to him. He made important intellectual contributions in theology, philosophy, and science, and his output included commentaries on biblical and philosophical works; writings on scientific, philosophical, pastoral, and devotional topics; as well as translations from Greek. As part of his investment in intellectual life and biblical exegesis, Grosseteste was committed to the importance of pastoral care, that is, the clergy’s responsibility to guide (and ultimately save the souls of) those in their care. Indeed, as Philippa M. Hoskin explains, “[b]y the time he became bishop of Lincoln, Grosseteste had a developed theory of pastoral care including its purpose, practice and effects.” Grosseteste saw pastoral care as something that not only helped save individuals but also “could bring about global salvation.” Working toward the pastoral goal of communicating complex theological and philosophical concepts to lay or uneducated audiences, Grosseteste’s decision to write some works in Anglo-Norman helped achieve this aim. Part of his project in the Chasteau, as professed in its opening section, is to reach readers who cannot read Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, an idea that the translator of the Middle English Castle of Love extends to those who cannot read French (Anglo-Norman).

Both Anglo-Norman and Middle English versions of the poem were composed in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, although neither version is strict about the number of syllables. The Middle English poem, like its Anglo-Norman precursor, deploys courtly poetry motifs, architectural imagery, legal concepts, and popular narrative techniques from oral storytelling to elucidate the poem’s central theme of Adam’s place in salvation history and humanity’s redemption. These aspects of the narrative are joined by the use of popular genres, including allegory and debate, the generic fluidity suggesting one reason for the poem’s popularity and influence on later medieval works. Grosseteste’s well-known and influential treatment of the allegory of the Four Daughters of God and the debate between Jesus and the Devil both employ the language of seisin (property ownership) and English law. The allegory of the Virgin Mary as the Castle of Love who protects Jesus’s Incarnation is a rich tapestry of descriptive architectural features and their symbolism. These treatments of the theme of salvation resonated so strongly with later medieval writers that Grosseteste’s Chasteau influenced such works as the Cursor Mundi [Runner of the World], the Gesta Romanorum [Deeds of the Romans], and William Langland’s Piers Plowman, among others; it also gave rise to three Middle English translations or adaptations, in addition to The Castle of Love edited here.

Title of the Poem

The poem’s title, whether in English or Anglo-Norman, appears to be apocryphal. Its first known use is in a Latin prologue of one of the extant Anglo-Norman versions of the poem (London, British Library, MS Egerton 846B), where it is given as Castellum amoris, showing the title’s association with the poem by 1325. The Vernon manuscript, as mentioned earlier, titles the poem Castel of Love in its incipit, and most modern scholars use this title for the English poem, and Le chasteau d’amour (or its Modern French version, Le château d’amour) for the Anglo-Norman poem. Castel is used in a figurative sense of the word, meaning “a spiritual fortress, a refuge; the stronghold of an emotion,” and the title comes from the allegory in the poem of Mary’s body as a castle protecting Jesus, discussed below (see pp. 15–18).

Synopsis of The Castle of Love

The overarching narrative in both the Anglo-Norman Chasteau d’amour and the Middle English Castle of Love is that of salvation history, a popular topic in the Middle Ages. For medieval people, this “history” was the story of humanity as detailed in the Bible, encompassing the creation of the world and everything in it, the Fall of Adam and Eve through disobedience to God, the saving of humanity afterward through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the end of the world, and the future judgment of mankind at Judgment Day or Doomsday. The mystery cycle plays (also called the Corpus Christi cycle) were a popular version of this type of narrative by the time of the Middle English Castle of Love (although it is doubtful Grosseteste would have approved of them).

The version of the story of salvation in the Middle English poem begins with the creation of the world and the subsequent casting of Lucifer (the Devil) into hell, along with many angels, because of their pride. The narrator then tells the story from the biblical Book of Genesis of God’s creation of Adam, and subsequently of Eve from Adam’s rib, describing how the two then dwell in paradise until the Fall of mankind through sin. The sin is their disobedience to God’s command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which resulted from the temptation of the Devil in the guise of a serpent and causes them to be cast out of paradise.

At this point, the poem departs from the Genesis narrative, describing how Adam lost his “seisin” (i.e., the world) and has become a “prisoner” because of his sin. The narrative then offers an allegory of the Four Daughters of the King (i.e., God), named Mercy, Truth, Justice, and Peace, who argue over whether to condemn the prisoner or release him. The King’s Son (i.e., Jesus), on hearing the dispute of his “sisters,” feels sorry for the prisoner and helps the sisters reconcile by taking the prisoner’s place, bearing all the punishment himself and thus redeeming Adam and saving all of humanity from the consequences of Adam’s sin. The narrative then explains “[h]ow ur Saveor wolde come” (line 596) and lists various biblical prophets who foretold the coming of Christ before focusing on a verse from the prophet Isaiah outlining the qualities of the Son (Jesus), which organizes the remainder of the narrative, as the poem annotates each characteristic from Isaias 9:6 in turn.

This extended exegesis on the verse from Isaias is punctuated by the story of Jesus’s Incarnation in the body of the Virgin Mary. To take the prisoner’s place, the Son (Jesus) must be born as a human, and Mary’s body is described in detail as a castle. Jesus’s birth happens so quietly that the Devil is not at first aware of him, but his lack of sin then draws the Devil’s attention. The Devil proceeds first to tempt Jesus by offering him the world and then to argue with him over mankind’s redemption. They negotiate a price: to get mankind out of prison, Jesus agrees to give up his whole body (i.e., die) and in the process suffer all the pains that mankind would have suffered in hell. Before death, however, Jesus goes on to perform miracles as detailed in the Gospels: he turns water into wine at the wedding in Cana, feeds five thousand people with five loaves and two fish, and raises Lazarus from the dead.

In the final section of the poem, Jesus suffers crucifixion and death, is resurrected, meets with his disciples, and ascends into heaven. The poem then describes the events leading up to Doomsday or the Last Judgment, when everyone will face God’s judgment. The poem ends with the division of the saved and the damned into heaven and hell, respectively, including a description of what each place will be like. A few lines are missing from the end (as evident from comparison with the Anglo-Norman poem), so the Middle English narrative closes at the end of the poem’s imaginary description of heaven.

Date, Audiences, and Language

The audience Southern proposes is one of “knightly retainers and officials in a great household,” based on the poem’s addresses to the audience and “general style,” without suggesting a date of composition. Kari Sajavaara dates Grosseteste’s writing of the Anglo-Norman poem to between 1230 and 1253, identifying a possible audience of “noble youths” living in Grosseteste’s household. These youths might have been, as first suggested by M. Dominica Legge, two of Simon de Montfort’s sons fostered there, which would date the poem at about 1250. Evelyn A. Mackie makes a strong case for dating the Anglo-Norman poem more narrowly, to probably between 1230 and 1235, when Grosseteste was teaching the Franciscans of Oxford, whom Mackie identifies as the most likely original audience. This group would have included laypeople, knights, and nobles, among others, as “Grosseteste’s responsibilities as lector to the Oxford convent would have required him to teach the entire community, not only those members intent on university studies.” Mackie points out based on scribal interventions that the manuscripts themselves provide information suggesting audiences were of differing social ranks. Andrew Reeves accepts Mackie’s assessment and theorizes that the poem was intended “to instruct laypeople or to help others instruct laypeople” and that it might have been intended as a Franciscan “preaching aid.”

Guiding the laity gained new importance after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which called “for the cultivation of inward contemplation amongst the lay Christian population.” Although reforms had already been going on in the previous century, Lateran IV codified several requirements for what clergy should teach laypeople. The canons issued at the council covered the doctrinal understanding of the Trinity, the Eucharist, and Penance, and they also demonstrated concern for “church discipline, clerical morals, episcopal elections, canon law, finances, and the treatment of heretics and Jews.” One focus of the canons was to raise the bar for education and preparation of the clergy so that they might minister to and guide the laity. More specific, though, was that all Christians were now required to partake in Communion and confession annually, which in turn required “instruction on the nature and implications of those sacraments.” Bishops were obligated to hold synods and issue statutes to begin implementing the canons, defining the goals of pastoral care the clergy under their authority should have for instructing laypeople.

Pastoral care — ultimately the enterprise of saving souls — should be the overriding goal of the clergy, in Grosseteste’s view. His statutes for the diocese of Lincoln reveal typical concerns, such as some priests relying on “their deacons [to] hear confessions” or “extort[ing] money from the laity for sacraments, including confession, or impos[ing] fines as penances.” The statutes are somewhat spare, however, as Grosseteste took for granted that clergy would read additional works on pastoral instruction or pastoralia. Pastorialia could be intended for the clergy or laity, and Grosseteste wrote works for each. His output was considerable, with thirteen Latin texts and three Anglo-Norman ones (four if the Chasteau is counted). Much can be gleaned from his pastoralia, particularly the Deus est [God is], a treatise on confession, and the Templum Dei [Temple of God], “a manual to prepare confessors” that also “includes a treatment of virtues and vices, the Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes, and the sacraments.” With its emphasis on confession, Grosseteste’s vision of pastoral care focused on the individual and also encompassed the salvation of all humanity, which included “guiding [humanity] towards the restoration of its relationship with God, and repairing the relationship between God and the natural world that the Fall had fractured.” In addition, Grosseteste’s personal supervision of his diocese reveals the high value he placed on direct and unmediated pastoral care. For example, when newly consecrated as bishop, he traveled extensively throughout his diocese despite his age, a pattern that continued throughout his tenure. Grosseteste felt so strongly about the importance of saving souls as a primary pastoral goal that in 1250 he attended a papal audience where he expressed concern about the tendency to appoint clergy more for “bureaucratic convenience, political expediency and family connexions” than for “saving souls from damnation” and asserted that he considered himself “personally accountable to God for each soul in his diocese.”

A work like the Chasteau addresses the preeminent pastoral concern of soul saving by giving readers the opportunity to grapple personally with a spectrum of theological concepts through its use of narrative, allegories, and debate. These techniques could entertain while offering religious instruction — a juxtaposition that might please a wide range of audiences, both clerical and lay. Enjoyment of Grosseteste’s poem was driven in part by a rising enthusiasm for religious texts that expanded after Lateran IV. As Andrew Taylor points out, the thirteenth century, when Grosseteste was writing, saw a marked increase in demand among lay readers for religious content. Some wealthy thirteenth-century lay readers, desperate for more complex religious instruction, even “acquired copies of the vernacular handbooks composed for their priests,” in addition to commissioning copies of texts more in line with their own requirements as lay readers. The Chasteau itself rode a “new wave of vernacular poems, embodying spiritual and devotional truths in the form of chivalric or visionary narratives which emerged around 1220,” that arose from the call of Lateran IV.

The manuscript traditions of the Anglo-Norman and Middle English versions offer evidence for their life after composition or translation, suggesting that over time the poem both maintained ecclesiastical connections and remained popular among lay people. Even the range in quality of the manuscripts that include the poem, from likely bespoke to those perhaps produced as part of the commercial book trade that was on the rise, indicates that all kinds of people enjoyed the poem. Mackie notes the ownership by religious establishments of four extant manuscripts and an additional twelve attested in medieval library catalogs. The provenance of several manuscripts likewise illustrates the ongoing interest women displayed in the poem. For example, a copy of the Anglo-Norman poem was made for the noblewoman Joan Tateshal in the late thirteenth century as part of a devotional manuscript. A fourteenth-century copy may have been prepared for the nunnery that owned it, or possibly for a novice. In the fifteenth century, a manuscript including the Chasteau was produced for Margaret of York, duchess of Burgundy.

Multilingual audiences form another important group, one of particular interest to an edition of a Middle English translation of an Anglo-Norman work. Maureen B. M. Boulton identifies several bi- and trilingual manuscripts that contain versions of the poem in either Anglo-Norman or Middle English. Boulton emphasizes the inclusion of a prologue in Latin in many Anglo-Norman copies, and in two cases regular annotations in Latin either summarizing material or citing “scriptural and patristic authorities.” The source poem’s code-switching between Latin and Anglo-Norman highlights the relation of audience to language, as does the strong interest in translating and adapting the Anglo-Norman poem into Middle English (as evinced by the four independent translations that survive, discussed below in the section on Popularity and Influences on Later Works; see pp. 26–27). Implicit in the act of translation or adaptation into English from Anglo-Norman is the issue of who the poem is for, a question that highlights the importance of understanding the multilingual reality of the medieval period. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne points out the problematic nature of “conceptualizing two separate vernacular languages and traditions, the English of England and the French of England” because “[t]he idea of a culture as a monoglot entity proceeding in organic linearity through time and within the territories of a modern nation state cannot adequately represent medieval textual production and linguistic and cultural contacts.” Indeed, the two languages demonstrate “a deeply interwoven lexical borrowing back and forth . . . that makes the boundaries of our modern dictionaries of ‘Middle English’ and ‘Anglo-Norman’ themselves problematic.”

The opening lines of both the Anglo-Norman and Middle English texts draw attention to the multilingualism of audiences in England at the same time as they avow linguistic limitations in conventional ways. The narrator of the Anglo-Norman poem explains the intention to write in “romance” [French] (Appendix, line 26) because not everyone can praise God in languages they do not know well — in this case, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (Appendix, lines 16–18). The narrator of the Middle English poem adapts this motif, announcing the intention to make the work accessible by writing in English for an unlearned audience unfamiliar with French and Latin: “Ne mowe we alle Latin wite, / Ne Ebreu, ne Gru that beth iwrite, / Ne French, ne this other spechen” [Nor can we all know Latin, / Nor Hebrew, nor Greek that are written, / Nor French, nor these other languages] (lines 23–25). This is a common motif in English prologues, one which the narrator circles back to and elaborates on later in the passage:

Thauh hit on Englisch be dim and derk Ne nabbe no savur bifore clerk, For lewed men that luitel connen, On Englisch hit is thus bigonnen. (lines 71–74)

[Though it (i.e., the poem) is hard to understand and obscure in English / And has no appeal in the presence of a cleric (learned person), / For the sake of unlearned people who know little, / In English it is in such a way begun.]

Here the narrator apologizes because English is not for educated people, but the subsequent lines reassure readers about the legitimacy of using English to understand religious truths. The narrator asserts that the wise and prudent reader who “yerne biholdeth this ilke writ” [attentively contemplates this very treatise] (line 76) may, despite the language, still find “[a]lle poyntes . . . / Of ure beleeve and Godes lay” [all points . . . about faith and God’s law] (lines 79–80).

That the translator adapted the list of languages from the prologue of the Anglo-Norman work into the Middle English poem illustrates that such overt discussions about writing in the vernacular for so-called unlearned readers are not unique to English prologues but are a feature of the period. The translator’s comments about English in these passages nevertheless reflect an anxiety that rests on the changed status of the language after the transition from Old to Middle English. Old English was the language of government and literature during the early English period, but this changed after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. King William replaced the governmental use of English with Latin, a change that Thomas Hahn argues undermined the importance of written English. French was imported along with Latin after the Conquest and became a standard literary language in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thus, in simple terms, Latin was the language of learning and government, accessible mainly to clerks; French was the standard for literature; and English represented the vernacular, oral culture. Nevertheless, it is important to understand these distinctions as fluid and evolving rather than fixed and separate. As Mark Faulkner points out, “[n]ot all languages were equal in their prestige, scope for conveying complex ideas and potential for an audience, and their capacity for each was constantly changing.”

James H. Morey argues against the idea that English before the end of the fourteenth century should be understood as “the silenced language,” since it still operated “as an important language of social, commercial, and religious discourse throughout the period.” Although Morey points to the difficulty in pinning down the success of English in relation to Latin and Anglo-Norman in the thirteenth century, some scholars aim to bridge that gap. Examining the transition between Old and Middle English in A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century, Faulkner cautions against characterizing the twelfth century as “inscrutable” or “a period of disjunction” for the English language. For Faulkner, the idea of a “rupture” in twelfth-century English is problematic, as it does not account for works that might be twelfth-century being characterized as Old English, the recent “steady stream of (re)discoveries of twelfth-century texts,” or the ease of coming up with “a generically diverse list” of texts in English most likely written in the so-called long twelfth century. Faulkner further highlights the importance of examining texts as multilingual productions in their cultural contexts and sees English society after the Conquest moving toward multilingualism. Indeed, even by the middle of the century preceding Grosseteste’s writing, many writers could speak, read, and write multiple languages, thus enabling them to make the best linguistic choices to support “their literary aspirations, linguistic competency and intended audience.” Grosseteste himself chose Anglo-Norman for the Chasteau and other works in order to include an audience he could not reach in Latin.

Although English becomes more important as a literary language over the course of the fourteenth century, Wogan-Browne notes that “reports of the fourteenth-century death of Anglo-Norman have been exaggerated.” Richard Ingham points out that the use of French in England was not isolated to literary efforts, as it was used administratively from the mid-thirteenth century onward. The fourteenth century then saw steep gains in French replacing Latin “for administrative and commercial purposes.” Similarly, the use of French in legal contexts spanned the period from 1275 to 1417. Ingham further explains that the lack of regular orthography and grammar in Anglo-Norman texts points to its persistence as a spoken language into the later medieval period in England and notes that evidence suggests pronunciation influenced the orthography of the written language. Anglo-Norman was not simply learned in school as a second language but rather continued to develop as a dialect alongside continental French until the late-fourteenth century. Even the Vernon manuscript (discussed below; see pp. 31–33), one of the preeminent manuscript collections of Middle English verse, is itself a trilingual manuscript; though predominately English in its contents, the codex includes some Anglo-Norman and Latin. Although one or the other may dominate at different times, it may be more profitable to think of English and Anglo-Norman as “sister vernaculars,” to modify a phrase from Thelma Fenster and Carolyn Collette. The relation between the two languages reflects “complementarity” rather than competition between “differing communities with opposed interests.” Just as the Anglo-Norman poem’s narrator positions French as the vernacular against Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the narrator of the Middle English poem in turn positions English as the vernacular against Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and French. The point is that all three languages — Latin, French, and English — were used in literary works throughout the medieval period, to a greater or lesser extent, and that ebb and flow is reflected in both the Middle English and Anglo-Norman poems presented in this volume.

The Middle English translation edited here may have been composed as early as 1300, around fifty years after Grosseteste’s death, and the earliest surviving manuscript witness, as I discuss later, was probably produced sometime between 1390 and 1400. The timing of the translation reflects a fourteenth-century rise in translations of French texts into English. Nevertheless, the gradual trajectory was toward a preference for religious texts in Middle English in the fourteenth century. The language of the translation is a southwestern Midland dialect, more specifically that of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, and southern Warwickshire, with some evidence of the eastern Midlands.

Sources

As mentioned earlier, the source for the Middle English Castle of Love is the Anglo-Norman Chasteau d’amour. There is not a single source for the Chasteau; it is rather a narrative tapestry that weaves together strands from a variety of sources. The opening sections describing the creation of Adam and Eve and their Fall through disobedience originate in the Bible’s creation story in Genesis (1–3). The allegory of the Four Daughters of God has its seeds in parables and allegories derived from Psalm 84:11, and the allegory of the Castle of Love has its genesis in exegesis of Luke 10:38. Jesus’s life, including the miracles he performs, his suffering and Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension into heaven all come from the New Testament (mainly the Gospels). The section detailing the signs leading up to the Last Judgment, which is an interpolation appearing only in the Middle English version, is a variant of The Fifteen Signs Before Doomsday. Finally, the Last Judgment of the dead and the visions of hell and heaven echo various biblical descriptions but also have their source in Grosseteste’s own ideas about the afterlife, as detailed in letters and other writings.

Southern sees the Anglo-Norman Chasteau d’amour as Grosseteste’s summa, that is, a comprehensive summation of his theological views. Southern points out that “[a]dvanced scientific learning and theological concepts on the fringe of eccentricity flowed irresistibly into his poetry of popular instruction,” as if Grosseteste “could not keep these thoughts out of his theology even on the most popular level.” The Middle English translation leaves out at least one of the most difficult concepts (as I discuss below; see pp. 22–25) but nevertheless maintains much of the theological complexity of the Anglo-Norman poem. But the popular and philosophical-theological themes are not really in conflict, and we should understand their juxtaposition as a feature of the poem, not a bug, as the Anglo-Norman Chasteau d’amour and the Middle English Castle of Love alike meld high theology and philosophy with genres that appealed to lay audiences.

Despite omitting some of the more esoteric concepts, The Castle of Love, like its Anglo-Norman precursor, touches on a number of theological doctrines. These include the concept of the Trinity, the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and Son, Jesus as fully God and fully human in the Incarnation, natural law (innate moral feeling, arrived at through reason) and positive law (divine law, created and imposed), the idea that God the Father created everything through the Son (i.e., Jesus), Mary’s perpetual virginity, the seven deadly sins, Christ’s judgment of the living and the dead in the Last Judgment, and the resurrection of the faithful at the Last Judgment, among others. The poem also successfully marries exegesis, exempla, theological complexity, and the themes of devotional literature with popular genres such as allegory, debate and dialogue, drama, and courtly or chivalric tales. Both poems likewise make use of popular narrative tropes, such as addressing the audience, meant to evoke an oral storytelling or reading performance.

Allegory of the Four Daughters of God

The allegory of the Four Daughters of God features the personified virtues Mercy, Truth, Justice, and Peace, named Merci, Soth, Riht, and Pees in the Middle English poem, and Misericorde, Verité, Justize, and Pes in the Anglo-Norman one. In a kind of courtroom drama, the daughters argue the case of a “prisoner” (Adam) confined because of his sin. This “trial” of the prisoner is a debate between the four sisters before their father, the King, whom the prisoner has wronged. The dramatic twist comes when their “brother,” the King’s Son (i.e., Jesus), offers to take the place of the prisoner in order to free him. The names of the daughters derive from Psalm 84:11: “Mercy and truth have met each other: justice and peace have kissed.” Some uses of the allegory before Grosseteste include the Midrash Rabbah, parables by Hugh of Saint-Victor and Bernard of Clairvaux, and an anonymous Latin prose version of the allegory, Rex et Famulus [The King and the Servant]. Two works by Grosseteste’s contemporary Guillaume Le Clerc may or may not be later than the Chasteau but do not appear to be sources: De salvatione hominis dialogus [Dialogue on the Salvation of Man or Dialogus] and the Vie de Tobie [Life of Tobias], which incorporates a version of the Dialogus. A version of Rex et Famulus was likely one of the direct sources for both the Dialogus and the Chasteau, as both poems share verbal correspondences with the Latin text (the majority in the Chasteau). Grosseteste’s main contributions to the allegory’s development are the legal and feudal aspects.

The allegory of the Four Daughters of God (lines 275–554 of the Middle English poem; lines 205–456 of the Anglo-Norman poem in the Appendix) opens with the description of a King (God) and his family: a Son (Jesus) and Four Daughters (Merci, Soth, Riht, and Pees). Having set up this familial situation, the narrator explains, “This Kyng, as you herdest ar this, / Hedde a thral that dude amis” [This King, as you heard before this, / Had a slave that did wrong] (lines 307–08). These lines reveal the relative relations between God and Adam as those between the King and his “thral.” The poem’s use of the word “thral” here echoes the narrator’s earlier explanation that Adam has become “[s]unnes thral” [sin’s slave] (line 242) because of the consequences of his transgression, emphasizing that a “thral may not crave / Throw riht non heritage to have” [slave may not demand / To have any heritage through right] because “[a]s sone as he is thral bicome, / His heritage is him binome” [as soon as he has become a slave, / His heritage is taken away from him] (lines 249–52). In other words, Adam has lost his right to his heritage because he has become “[s]unnes thrall” as a result of his disobedience to God’s laws.

The word “thral” is only used in the poem in two passages: the section describing the consequences of the Fall and throughout the allegory of the Four Daughters of God. The link to the earlier usage not only shows that the “thral” is Adam but also makes clear that he is the King’s “thral” because of his transgression, not because he is meant to be a slave or servant to the King. Although the word “thral” can mean in literal terms “a slave, servant, serf,” or “a subject,” it can also designate “a prisoner, captive.” Adam’s relationship to God should have been that of a vassal with a seisin, but he has lost his right to his inheritance and now is simply a prisoner. The use of “thral” in the allegory emphasizes Adam’s status as prisoner throughout the argument between the sisters, as the narrator refers to the “thral” being released from prison (lines 359, 368), mentions the “thral” being sentenced to death (lines 410, 424), and at one point directly equates the terms: “the thral, the prisoun, / Mote come to sum raunsoun” [the slave, the prisoner, / Must come to a redemption (i.e., be redeemed)] (lines 513–14).

Throughout the allegory, Merci and Pees advocate the prisoner’s release, whereas Soth and Riht argue for his condemnation. Merci blames the prisoner’s enemies, as they seduced him through their promise that he would have God’s power if he ate the fruit of the forbidden tree, and advocates mercy and forgiveness for him. Truth argues against Merci’s desire to release the prisoner, insisting that he sinned, and the King should not listen to Merci. Truth says the prisoner deserves what he gets and should stay in prison; he has lost mercy and forgiveness, and he was warned beforehand. Riht says she is the magistrate and that just judgments come from the King. She contends that the prisoner deserves death because he turned away from Merci, Pees, Soth, and Riht and left them of his own free will; if justice prevails, the prisoner will suffer death, for Soth has witnessed that he is guilty, and Riht, as magistrate, is willing to pass sentence on him. Pees finally speaks up and complains that Soth and Riht have forsaken her by making their judgment without Pees, and that they also refuse to allow Merci to sway them. Pees appeals the judgment of Soth and Riht, saying it is unacceptable and too violent without Merci and Pees, and that no judgment should be made until all four sisters agree. She then says she will flee and not return unless all her sisters are reconciled. The King’s Son then addresses his father and says he will reconcile the sisters by putting on “the thralles weden” [the slave’s clothes] (line 547) and “holde the doom” [endure the punishment] (line 549) that Soth and Riht “wolden and beoden” [order and command] (line 548). The framing of the story of Christ’s redemption of humanity as a tale of a king and his children, of lost inheritance and reconciliation, calls to mind popular courtly and chivalric literature but then uses these motifs in a theological context, just as the allegory of the Castle of Love does.

Allegory of the Castle of Love

The dispute between the Four Daughters of God and the resolution of their conflict through the Son sets up in turn the allegory of Mary’s body as the Castle of Love, which represents the Incarnation of Jesus. The allegory of the Castle of Love is related to the more general one of the castle of the body, used in poems such as Thomas of Hales’s Love Rune. The idea of the castle or household representing the soul under siege is typified by poems such as the Katherine Group sermon Sawles Warde (The Guardianship of the Soul), in which Wit (Reason) is the head of the household, and the Four Daughters of God (in this case the cardinal virtues of Vigilance, Spiritual Strength, Moderation, and Righteousness) must help guard the soul against Wit’s wayward wife Will and the vices led by the Fiend (Devil). A variant is the allegory of the five senses as guardians of the soul within the heart, seen in Part Two of the Ancrene Wisse, or Guide for Anchoresses, a thirteenth-century prose work in early Middle English related to the Katherine Group texts and written for women who chose to live as anchorites. These are all related concepts, but the Virgin as a stronghold is itself a longstanding idea that originated in part from Jerome’s use in Luke 10:38 of castellum [village] in the Latin Vulgate Bible; in the Middle Ages, the village became “a single edifice,” in turn leading exegetes to “read this biblical text as an allegory of Jesus’ entry into Mary’s womb.” The motif was generally popular in sermons in England by the twelfth century. But, whereas earlier references to the Virgin drawing on architecture were limited to religious contexts, in the twelfth century, vernacular literary versions began to make use of the motif.

The description of the castle in the allegory is elaborate and highly symbolic, a fact the poem itself highlights with its explicit interpretations of the castle’s architecture and colors. The castle is described as “[m]uche and feir and loveliche” [great and strong and lovely] (line 668), with a tower surrounded by a defensive trench impenetrable to any “kunnes asaylyng” [kind of military assault] (line 675). It stands in the borderland and fears no foe; it is on a high cliff where siege engines cannot harm it. It stands on a firm rock surrounded by deep ditches; four small towers surround the tower’s perimeter, and there are three baileys to defend it. Its battlements are protected by seven barbicans (outer fortifications), each with a gate and tower, and no one who flees there for protection will be harmed by enemies.

The castle is colored on the outer walls with three colors: the foundation is green; the middle color is indigo blue; the uppermost color illuminates everything around it and is redder than any rose. Within, the castle shines as white as snow, and the light is cast so wide that wrong can never come there. From the midst of the high tower springs a well that always flows, with four streams that flow upon the gravel and fill the moats. Whoever may draw this water need not seek any other medicine. There is a white ivory throne in the tower, brighter than the summer sun, cleverly made, with seven steps leading to it, surrounded by a rainbow. No king or emperor ever had a fairer throne. Where God chose his inn, there will never be another such castle: “the castle of love and lisse, / Of solace, of socour, of joye and blisse, / Of hope, of hele, of sikerness” [the castle of love and delight, / Of comfort, of refuge, of joy and bliss, / Of hope, of salvation, of safety] (lines 757–59).

The narrator then explains the meaning of the castle and its design: “This is the Maydenes [i.e., Virgin Mary’s] bodi so freo” (line 761). The firm rock is the Virgin’s heart, which sin never entered. The greenness of the foundation is the Virgin’s faith, for faith is the foundation of all virtues. The middle color (blue) signifies sweetness and beauty; the meaning is that she was busy in sweetness to serve God in humility. The third color (red), the uppermost, that casts its light over everything as though it were burning, is the love clear and bright with which she is all alight, and she is moved by the fire of love to serve God above her. The four small towers that protect the high tower are the cardinal virtues, Fortitude, Prudence, Justice, and Temperance, and every one has a gate with a defensive machine so that wickedness cannot enter. Of the three baileys, the innermost signifies the Virgin’s holy virginity, the middle signifies her holy chastity, and the outermost signifies her holy marriage. The seven barbicans (fortifications) that protect this castle so well with arrow and crossbow bolt, are the seven virtues that overcome the seven deadly sins. Pride, the beginning and root of all evil, is overcome by Humbleness; True Love (Charity) overcomes Envy; Abstinence overcomes Gluttony; Lust is made to flee through Mary’s holy Chastity; Covetousness (Greed) is destroyed through Generosity; Wrath (Anger) is overcome by Patience; and spiritual Joy destroys Sloth. The well that fills the moat is God’s grace; God loved this Virgin so much he gave the full amount of grace to her, through whom the grace that overflows saves all the world even now. The moats are her long-suffering poverty, through whom the Devil is overcome, and his power destroyed. At the end of this instructive section, the narrator’s own voice intrudes into the poem, as he bangs on the gate to the castle and directly addresses the Virgin Mary, requesting help against his three foes, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil (enemies of mankind in Christian tradition), who have beset him with armies.

Southern suggests that the castle is “of up-to-date design,” identifying “the extreme elaboration and modernity of the castle’s outworks and fortifications” as particular to Grosseteste. But even if the architectural features described are real, the castle itself is unrealistic. Boulton points out, for example, the contrast between the number of barbicans (seven), and real castles of the period, which might have up to two. Likewise, Abigail Wheatley argues that the Castle of Love does not represent a real building but is rather an “architectural mnemonic” meant to help “the recall of a series of sacred texts and devotional precepts.” Mackie sees the castle’s architecture evoking the details of New Jerusalem’s biblical description (from the Apocalypse) and some of its medieval interpretations. The ideas that the architecture in Grosseteste’s poem makes use of real design elements or that it is highly symbolic do not necessarily conflict. The use of recognizably specific and tangible architectural features to express ideas of symbolic or theological importance could be a way of using the concrete to help audiences understand the figurative. Wheatley nevertheless rejects the view of architecture being used in this way: “Far from representing the mediation of difficult theology through an essentially lay and medieval symbol, Grosseteste’s Château d’Amour expresses the strength of the castle as a Biblical type and religious image.”

Christiania Whitehead sees the castle as equally figurative, linking the treatment of Mary as a castle in Grosseteste’s poem with the depictions of “virginity as an inviolate castle” that permeate the Ancrene Wisse. Whitehead questions whether Grosseteste may have meant Mary’s body in the poem to be interpreted as “an anchoritic exemplum” in which Grosseteste perhaps deliberately highlights similarities between Mary’s “vocation of intact perfection and that of the thirteenth-century anchoresses.” Whitehead sees the impenetrable castle “[w]orking in conscious contradiction to normative perceptions of fallen femininity as open, breachable and characterized by incompletion and excessive release of moisture”; thus, “[t]he writing of Mary as a castle stands as a total annulment of her female physicality.” Whitehead points out that, at the same time, the intrusion of the narrator’s voice into the final section of the allegory, as he bangs on the gate begging Mary for entry to protect him from the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, effectively undermines the idea of the inviolate virgin because of the frequent association of such scenes with secular romances, where “the courtly castle of the flesh is built to await violation”; that is, the assault on a castle is a metaphor for an attempt on virginity, whether through rape or seduction.

Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou points out, however, that even if “many of the poems to the Virgin make use of the language of courtly love, they never catalogue the beauties of Mary’s body” because religious poetry conceptualizes Mary’s body “in multiple metaphors, derived from centuries of patristic biblical hermeneutics.” The focus on Mary’s virginity illustrates this aspect of the religious use of the courtly motif of virginity as a “locked gate” of the castle, most clearly represented in The Castle of Love as the “faste gat” [closed gate] (line 877) that Jesus both enters and exits in the course of the Incarnation without opening (see lines 877–88). Wheatley connects the gate to Ezechiel 44:2: “And the Lord said to me: This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall pass through it: because the Lord the God of Israel hath entered in by it, and it shall be shut”; more prominently, the “faste gat” refers to Mary’s virginity (perhaps even, in a literal sense, to the hymen). The “faste gat” emphasizes the idea that Mary remains a virgin even after she has conceived and born Jesus at the same time as it alludes to the idea of Mary as the “gate of heaven,” a metaphor Boklund-Lagopoulou explores in depth. In religious literature of the Middle Ages, Mary is represented as “sinless because she maintains her bodily virginity, her intact and unpenetrated body. Because she is a virgin and thus physically pure, her body can become a conduit, a passage or gateway between heaven and earth, God and man, spirit and flesh. Christ descended from heaven into her body; but also, in a reverse movement, sinners can pass through Mary into heaven.”

As these interpretations highlight, Mary’s importance is primarily as a theological construct, not as a person. Whitehead points this out when she explores the relation of the castle allegory to the development of the cult of the Virgin Mary, “in which the architectural representation of the Virgin acts as an appropriate response to advances in Marian doctrine which, promoting the concepts of the Immaculate Conception and the Bodily Assumption, increasingly detach her from human limitation, and from the flaws and changes associated with sin, sex, age and death.” Whether as a type of the New Jerusalem, an “architectural mnemonic,” an elaboration of the virgin-as-castle motif, “an anchoritic exemplum,” or a “gate of heaven,” Mary’s significance lies in her role as a double vessel: that of the body that literally received Jesus in the Incarnation and that of the castle, which exists as a repository of theological interpretations. The poem in other words offers Mary’s body as a symbolic text for the reader’s pleasure and consumption. Just as the narrator elucidates the meaning of the architectural features and their colors in the description of the castle, so the representation of the architecture in the castle allegory invites analysis by the reader, following the narrator’s model. And just as the narrator intrudes into the narrative and pounds on the “faste gat,” asking Mary for help to save him from his enemies, so the reader may follow the narrator’s lead in intruding to beg entry to the castle.

Courtly Romance

Part of the appeal of the poem was no doubt its use of tropes and conventions from popular genres. As we saw in the section on the Castle of Love allegory just above, the poem makes use of courtly or chivalric romance motifs in its treatment of Mary as a castle to be defended, with the dual implications of the “faste gat”(line 877) that protects both Jesus in the womb and Mary’s virginity from assault, calling to mind poems such as Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Le roman de la Rose [The Romance of the Rose], a well-known example of a courtly romance where the assault on a castle is an attempt on virginity (Guillaume’s portion was written ca. 1230, around the same time as or slightly before the Chasteau). Another aspect of the theme shows up in the Four Daughters of God allegory of the earlier part of the poem, discussed above (see pp. 13–14), where we see the playing out of a domestic drama, in which the King is betrayed by his servant, who is then tried by the King’s Four Daughters, and subsequently redeemed by his Son.

Alongside these allegorical scenes, the poem’s language resonates with the courtly love genre in the deliberate use of “trewe love” to describe the love God wants from humanity (line 1024). The corresponding “fin amur” [true love] from the Anglo-Norman poem (Appendix, line 998) makes clear the implications of the phrase, which the Anglo-Norman poem uses again later to emphasize the degree of God’s love for humanity (Appendix, line 1376). Both “trewe love” and “fin amur” signify the concept of Christian love or charité [charity]. The AND defines fin amur as “fin amor, courtly love,” but, despite its secular associations, “fin amur” had a dual resonance as a term for courtly love in lyric poetry as well as the perfect love of God in religious contexts. The frequent use in both poems of the more straightforward word “charité” (lines 912, 987, 1162; Appendix, lines 697, 737, 820, 961, 996), however, points to Grosseteste’s (and the translator’s) deliberate choice to evoke a courtly love context for understanding how humanity and God should love one another.

This juxtaposition of courtly love language with religious ideals was common in religious poetry. For example, we see a similar use in Thomas of Hales’s Love Rune, a thirteenth-century Middle English poem that explores the confluence of holy and erotic love more overtly than the Chasteau. As in the Chasteau, the narrator of the poem uses fyn amur in a religious context: “Mayde, al so ich the tolde, the ymston of thi bur / He is betere an hundred-folde than alle theos in heore culur; / He is idon in heovene golde, and is ful of fyn amur [Maid, as I told you, the gemstone of your bower, / He is better a hundredfold than all these in their colors; / He is set in the gold of heaven, and is full of fin amour] (Thomas of Hales, Love Rune, ed. and trans. Fein, lines 89–91; italics in original). The description here dually refers to “Christ and the gem of virginity.” In The Castle of Love, Mary’s virginity is not a gem but rather a “faste gat” (line 877), and her body as the castle is protected in part by “Trewe Love” (line 833), one of the seven virtues represented by the barbicans guarding the Castle of Love, a place where “Charité is constable” (line 912). The appropriation of courtly love language for religious contexts would still echo the secular poetry from which it was drawn, enhancing the enjoyment of audiences who wanted to be both religiously educated and entertained in a popular fashion.

Debate and Legal Language

The “trial” of the “prisoner” (Adam) conducted by the Four Daughters of God and the later argument between Jesus and the Devil over Adam rely on the conventions of debate and dialogue, related types of poetry popular throughout the medieval period. The poem’s interest in legal language and the finer points of law, particularly evident in these sections, enhanced the drama of these episodes. This focus on what John A. Alford calls “the art of pleading” was part of a trend that began developing in debate and dialogue as early as The Owl and the Nightingale; the subgenre’s apex was arguably found in Piers Plowman, which contains “several charters, court scenes, and hundreds of legal terms and maxims from common, civil, and canon law, so that in the whole history of English literature there is nothing even remotely to be compared with it.”

In the preamble to the allegory of the Four Daughters of God, the poem places sin in the context of feudal relations and legal consequences; that is, Adam’s sin causes his loss of his inheritance or seisin (i.e., possession of the world). The Anglo-Norman poem equates sin with the legal meaning of “defaute” as a failure to appear in court in answer to a summons: “Pecché, ad parole breve, /Est defaute apertement; / Defaute e pecché en un se entent” [Sin, in a brief word, / Is clearly default; / Default and sin are considered as one] (Appendix, lines 160–62). The explanation of this “defaute” occurs two lines later: “Defaute aprés defaute a fine / Fet par dreit perdre seysine” [Default after default in the end / Rightfully causes one to lose lawful possession] (Appendix, lines 165–66), the narrator adding that “[e]ncore en la curt le rey / Use l’um icele ley” [even now in the court of the king / One practices the aforesaid law] (Appendix, lines 167–68). This definition of “defaute” is based on a point of thirteenth-century English law referring to a defendant’s failed court appearance: if a defendant was in default (i.e., absent) two times without a legitimate excuse (“[d]efaute aprés defaute”), the court would award the disputed property to the plaintiff. Alford quotes a specific hypothetical case studied by law students of the day, which explained: “il fayte outrement defaute e aspres defaute si perd seysine de terre” [he committed, finally, default after default, thus lost seisin of land]. Alford notes that Grosseteste borrowed this legal point “almost verbatim into his poem” and suggests he “redefined the term ‘defaute’ in order to make it fit.”

The Castle of Love uses “wone” similarly to “defaute” but does not define the term in the same technical way. The narrator says that “sunne and wone, al is on” [sin and (de)fault, all is one] (line 233), where “wone” still refers to a failure to meet a legal requirement or a lack of conformity to law. But the subsequent lines do not explain the point of law on which the idea turns, simply saying that Adam committed “wone” when he resisted God’s commandment and when he ate the apple, adding that “[t]horw wone he lees his seysyne, / Thorw wone he brouhte himself in pyne” [through sin he lost his seisin / Through sin he brought himself into pain] (lines 237–38). Like the Chasteau, the Middle English poem says that every day in the king’s court “[m]e useth thulke selve lay” [people enforce the very same law] (line 240), but there is no line equivalent to “[d]efaute aprés defaute.” This line in the Chasteau makes explicit Grosseteste’s meshing of sin with default, which undergirds the Anglo-Norman poem’s legal code and lays out Adam’s sin in familiar terms audiences could understand. As Jane Zatta points out, in the Chasteau “God operates under exactly the same code of laws as contemporary English kings, and it is by comparison to feudal reality and its values of descent, inheritance, and land, that Grosseteste explains the generosity of God and presents the rewards of salvation.” Rhodes argues that the legal wrangling is one of the aspects of the poem that “humanizes [Grosseteste’s] characters” by “placing them in a familiar setting surrounded by familiar concerns.” Just as contemporary English plaintiffs would have, Adam lost his inheritance through “defaute,” which stands for sin. The Four Daughters of God allegory then offers a dramatic rendition that illustrates how the legal concepts play out in the world.

Like we saw in the allegory of the Four Daughters of God and the play between the meanings of “sin” and “defaute,” the dialogue between Jesus and the Devil in lines 1041–1132 of The Castle of Love displays an interest in legal argumentation. More properly a dialogue than a courtroom drama, despite its legal “pleading,” the encounter alludes to the biblical account of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. The conversation in the poem is a foreshortened and rearranged version of that in the Gospel of Matthew (see especially 4:8–10). The Devil attempts to argue his case for “seisyne,” saying, “icham prince and lord of this londe, / And in the seisyne habbe longe ibe / Thorw the heighe Kyng that grant hit me” [I am the prince and lord of this land, / And in the seisin (possession in freehold) have long been / Through the high King Who granted it to me] (lines 1048–50). Jesus retorts that the agreement was held until the Devil broke it by telling Adam he could eat the apple without consequences (lines 1066–74). The Devil’s response is that he is “bitrayyed” and “thorw ple overcomen” [overcome by argumentation] (lines 1079–80), but he goes on to assert that Adam is his prisoner because he “hath misdon” [has done wrong (i.e., sinned)] (line 1087) and therefore must be ransomed from the Devil: “bote he beo forbought of me, / He ne oughte from wo disseysed be” [unless he be ransomed from me, / He should not be delivered from suffering] (lines 1089–90). The word “disseysed,” here translated as “delivered,” may be a deliberate play on the more common meanings of the verb: “to deprive (sb.) of seizin; to dispossess (sb.) unlawfully (of land, goods, etc.)” and “to deprive (sb.) of authority, dominion, or privileges.” This wordplay illustrates some of the enjoyment offered by the legal wrangling between Jesus and the Devil throughout the scene.

The Devil’s demand in this dialogue for a ransom in order to release Adam has sometimes been interpreted as evidence of Grosseteste’s support for the Devil’s rights theory of Christ’s redemption of humanity. Sajavaara explains that there were two main threads to the theory, one juridical, based on the idea of Christ as a ransom for Adam, the other political, centering on the Devil’s abuse of power. The ransom idea held that “God and the Devil are . . . two opposing rulers, who desire man’s soul. Adam has the choice, and he chooses the Devil. To make man return to him God must give ransom to the Devil, and this ransom is his only Son”; the abuse of power view maintained that “[a] contract between God and the Devil stipulated the limits of their spheres and neither of them could infringe on the domain of the other. The life and death of fallen man was in the hands of the Devil, but he used his power on the Son and transgressed the contract.” C. W. Marx explains that in the Chasteau’s debate between Christ and the Devil, Grosseteste ultimately rejects the idea of the Devil’s rights. But, as Alford argues, even though the theory was debunked in the eleventh century, because of its “dramatic possibilities,” poets wanted to “keep the old analogy of ransom but qualify it by means of a debate between Christ and Satan in which the author of law himself would overthrow the Devil’s claims to any ‘rights.’” Audiences knew how the conflict would turn out but enjoyed the process of seeing Jesus trick the Devil and win the debate. The Devil was sure that he would profit by Jesus’s death when he took the deal to exchange Jesus for the “prisoner,” the narrator explains, but instead is caught and defeated, “[a]s fisch that is with hok inomen, / That, whon the worm he swoleweth alast, / He is bi the hok itiyed fast” [as a fish that is captured with a fishhook / So that, when he at last swallows the worm, / He is tethered fast by the hook] (lines 1130–32; compare Appendix, lines 1106–08). The use of a proverbial saying to close the debate helps audiences connect with the narrative. These dramatic scenes, such as the prisoner’s trial and the debate between Jesus and the Devil, offered medieval audiences the popular appeal characteristic of dialogues and debates and even evoked some of the pleasures of medieval drama.

Relation between Le chasteau d’amour and The Castle of Love

Although it is a translation, the Middle English poem is not simply a copy of the Anglo-Norman original, nor is it an oversimplified version of a more sophisticated poem. It is rather a series of contractions, expansions, reorganizations, interpolations, and gaps based on the needs and interests of its own audience and the knowledge and interpretations of the translator. Sajavaara notes that approximately seventy-four percent of the lines in the Middle English translation have matching verses in the Anglo-Norman text. To understand more about the relation between the two poems, I examine two instances of theological complexity, one that appears only in the Anglo-Norman, and one that is preserved in both the Anglo-Norman and Middle English versions.

The first is the elision from the Middle English poem of two related philosophical-theological concepts: natura naturans (God as the creator) and natura naturata (nature as the creation). Southern explains that Grosseteste’s use of these terms was meant “to express the unity of God and nature, both in the Creation and Incarnation” and suggests the translator probably left them out because they were “beyond the comprehension of a popular audience.” But such complexities did not necessarily put off medieval audiences. Consider that by the thirteenth century lay audiences were eating up religious poetry of instruction in the vernacular, such as a nearly fourteen-thousand-line didactic religious poem, Pierre d’Abernon’s popular Lumere as lais [Light for the Laity], which accompanies the Chasteau in one manuscript (see discussion of Bodley 399, pp. 41–42, below). And by the fourteenth century, the Middle English Castle of Love could be found in the Vernon manuscript together with the A-version of William Langland’s masterpiece of complexity, Piers Plowman, which, despite “its inherent difficulties . . . was extremely popular in its own time, as more than fifty surviving manuscripts attest.” As Rebecca Davis argues, Langland’s poem in fact took Grosseteste’s affirmation of “the intimacy between God and nature” one step further in the figure of Kynde, “Piers Plowman’s daring merger of creator and creation.”

I suggest rather that the Chasteau’s translator may have left out the passage including these concepts at least in part because the lines are just plain confusing, as is clear from the way they confounded medieval copyists, as well as modern editors and translators. In the following lines, the Anglo-Norman poem discusses the concepts of natura naturans and natura naturata (I have italicized the Anglo-Norman counterparts here):

Mout est nature enbelie Kaunt Nature naturaunce A nature est ignoraunce Kaunt nature est naturee; Lors est nature puree Cent taunt plus ke einz n’estoit Einz ke Adam forfet avoit. (Appendix, lines 866–72)

(Nature is greatly embellished When God the Creator Is without knowledge of nature When nature is created; Then is nature purified A hundred times more than formerly it was Before Adam had sinned.)

These lines are difficult to interpret because it is unclear what could be meant by “[w]hen God the Creator / Is without knowledge of nature / When nature is created.” Perhaps “ignoraunce” is a metaphor meant to refer not to an absence of knowledge per se but rather to God’s lack of human nature before the Incarnation, after which Jesus becomes fully human while retaining full divinity, but the meaning is not self-evident. That these concepts were challenging not only to a potential translator but also to copyists of the Anglo-Norman poem is clear from the variants in this passage among the Anglo-Norman manuscripts — and the fact that one surviving copy leaves out the lines altogether; the fluidity of the lines among the Anglo-Norman copies implies that not all scribes copying their exemplars knew what the passage was saying.

The difficulty due to the word “ignoraunce” [ignorant, without knowledge] (Appendix, line 868) has led modern editors and translators to revise and interpret the passage to make sense of it. In his discussion of the lines, Southern sidesteps the problem by emending to “joygnante” in place of “ignoraunce,” changing “A nature est ignoraunce” to “A nature est joygnante.” The reason for this emendation is clear, since it makes better sense of the lines to say that “nature is greatly embellished when God is joined to nature,” and the change helps clarify that the lines refer to the Incarnation of Jesus. Unfortunately, the emendation to “joygnante” is not supported by any manuscript reading; although “joygnante” does occur in one copy of the poem, it is in place of “naturaunce” in the previous line (line 867), not in place of “ignoraunce.” In addition, it is unclear what should be done with the line, “Kaunt nature est naturee,” if the previous line means something like “is joined to nature” (lit. “to nature is juxtaposed”). Southern, Mackie, and Boulton all translate the passage using the emended reading (i.e., with “joined”), but only Mackie includes a direct translation of the line “Kaunt nature est naturee,” as “so that Nature was perfected.” These difficulties illustrate the challenges readers, translators, and copyists alike would have had in understanding the theological point being made.

Although it is certainly possible the surviving exemplars all contain some corruption of these lines, I suggest the difficulty of God’s “ignoraunce” of nature can be resolved by recognizing a deliberate ambiguity in the phrase “nature est naturee,” a line meant not as a direct translation but rather a riff on the philosophical term nature naturee [the created world]. In this verse, the phrase arguably also refers to the Incarnation of Christ, with “nature” in “nature est naturee” referring simultaneously to creation and Creator. That is, the phrase means both “nature is created” and “the Creator is Incarnated.” The second interpretation suggests the idea of “est naturee” as the process of Jesus undergoing birth as a human being (through Mary’s Castle of Love) and acquiring “nature,” that is, both “human nature” and “the human form.” The play on “naturee” likewise offers the sense of “natural, from birth” or “natural, innate,” which again emphasizes that Jesus is fully human, even as the earlier reference to “Nature naturaunce” alludes to God as the Creator and shows he is fully divine (a theological doctrine made clear in both versions of the poem). As a continuation of this play on “nature,” “nature puree” in the subsequent line refers both to Christ’s human body and the perfected human nature that Jesus fulfills. The complex philosophical terminology, together with repetition of the word “nature” and related words, offer a convoluted play on words that underpins in turn a theological complexity that may have defeated the translator’s attempts to parse it, just as it has many modern readers. And even if the translator knew the technical terms and was familiar with the concepts, the exemplar may not have included the passage or may have garbled it enough to make it nonsensical.

The second comparison of the Middle English to the source poem, in contrast, shows that wordplay and complexity do not necessarily deter the translator, who in some cases chose instead to explore the earlier poem’s density. The difficulty arises in a passage of the Chasteau where the narrator explains that the Child whom Isaiah foretold (i.e., Jesus) is both fully human and fully God, and “Par lui tute rien est fet, / E sanz lui nule rien n’est” [Through Him everything is created, / And without Him nothing is (created)] (Appendix, lines 553–54). Following these lines, a single verse in the Anglo-Norman poem has troubled modern editors and translators, who have not arrived at any consensus in translating the line: “Kar defaute n’est pas fet” [Indeed sin (default) is not created] (Appendix, line 555). R. F. Weymouth translates the line as “for it [i.e., creation] was not made defective (or, faulty).” In contrast, Mackie offers a different interpretation: “Now sin was not created.” Boulton in turn presents yet another possibility: “for he was not created in sin,” clarifying this to mean “when he became man, Jesus was free of all sin, unlike all other humans who are born with original sin.” The range of translations illustrates the struggle a translator faces when interpreting this line. The challenge arises out of the difficulties in understanding what is meant by the word “defaute” in the Anglo-Norman poem, as well as in interpreting how the word is being used. The Anglo-Norman Dictionary entry for defaute (n.) includes the senses “lack, shortage; need, want”; “error, mistake; fault, defect”; and “failure; failure to attend; default, failure to answer a summons.” Most pertinent here is the legal meaning of “defaute” as a failure to appear in court in answer to a summons because the narrator already explained earlier that sin is equivalent to a legal default, as discussed above (see pp. 20–21). In the Chasteau, “defaute” is thus freighted, since it encompasses a wide range of meanings: the definitions given in the poem — sin and legal default (i.e., absence from court) — alongside other meanings already implicit in the word, such as lack, error, imperfection, and so on.

The translator of the Middle English poem resolves these challenges through an expansion of that single line into three lines, an amplification that reveals the sophistication of the translator’s insights into the Anglo-Norman verse, even as modern editors and translators have struggled to make sense of it. At the end of the translation of the passage about the marvelous child (lines 645–50), the subsequent three lines in The Castle of Love translate the single line 555 from the Chasteau (“Him” refers to Jesus): “And withouten Him is synne evere, / For wone dude He nevere, / Ne no schaft thorw Him mihte lees” [And sin is always outside Him, / For He never committed default (or, made a mistake; or, caused an imperfection / a lack / an omission), / And no creature might be dispossessed through Him] (lines 651–53). These three lines resolve the potential translation challenge by unpacking the word “defaute” from the Anglo-Norman poem into its various connotations, as the three lines evoke several meanings of the word from the source poem. In particular, the movement from the concepts of sin to default to dispossession in the lines suggests not only the range of meanings the word “defaute” conveys in the single line from the Chasteau but also a progression in which the presence of sin would cause default, which would in turn lead to dispossession.

By deliberately including in the three lines of the translation a range of ideas about sin, mistakes, imperfection, lack, and being dispossessed of property or inheritance because of a legal default, the English translator in fact demonstrates a deep understanding of both the implications contained in the Anglo-Norman word and the difficulties presented by the line and its possible interpretations. The use of “wone” to translate “defaute” encompasses a similarly wide range of meanings: mistake, imperfection, lack, or omission, in addition to “lack of conformity to a law or legal requirement, transgression, fault.” The use of this Middle English word reveals a nuanced sense of the Anglo-Norman poem: “wone” simultaneously replicates the density of “defaute,” even as the medieval translator parses for the English-reading and -listening audiences the meaning of the original verse by turning the single line into three. Perhaps the difference between excluding some ideas and expanding on others has to do with the interests of the translator’s audience, who might find points of English law — and the courtroom drama the poem portrays — more relevant than the “new and highly controversial,” as well as technical and philosophical, ideas of natura naturans and natura naturata.

Popularity and Influences on Later Works

Grosseteste’s Anglo-Norman Chasteau was popular enough to survive in eighteen manuscripts. Taylor proposes that it was “a medieval best-seller,” offering as evidence the poem’s frequent grouping with other popular works and its appearance in manuscripts whose quality suggests they were professionally copied as part of the book trade instead of being prepared by clerics for a wealthy household. Grosseteste himself was a popular figure with brand-name recognition, which made him appealing to bookmakers because he was a prestigious and authoritative ecclesiastic, who nevertheless chose to write in the Anglo-Norman vernacular. Grosseteste consequently had a number of works falsely attributed to him and “by the late fourteenth century . . . had become a legendary figure.”

In addition to the extant copies of the Anglo-Norman poem, four Middle English translations survive. The Castle of Love, edited here, is the translation closest to the Anglo-Norman poem and survives in three manuscripts (discussed below; see pp. 29–34). The fifteenth-century Myrour of Lewed Men is the only translation besides The Castle of Love that preserves the overall outline of salvation history from the Chasteau’s narrative, but it has been translated much more loosely. The other two focus only on the allegory of the Four Daughters of God, a particularly popular element from Grosseteste’s poem. These shorter Middle English poems are “The King and His Four Daughters” and the incomplete “Foure Daughters.” The four Middle English poems appear to be independent translations. The repeated interest in providing Middle English adaptations illustrates the popularity of the Anglo-Norman poem while acknowledging the difficulties of access to Anglo-Norman by the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Two of the four Middle English versions note this linguistic challenge by adding “French” to a list of inaccessible languages (Latin, Hebrew, and Greek).

In addition, there are a number of medieval French poems based on the Chasteau d’amour that also center on the Four Daughters’ debate. The allegory likewise appears in later Middle English works, including the Cursor Mundi [Runner of the World], a biblical paraphrase that incorporates some passages translated from the Chasteau d’amour; the Gesta Romanorum [Deeds of the Romans], a popular collection of tales in Latin; Langland’s Piers Plowman, an allegorical dream vision; The Court of Sapience, a dream vision that is a kind of allegorical proto-encyclopedia; The Castle of Perseverance, a late-medieval morality play where the Four Daughters of God appear as characters who debate Mankind’s salvation; Mankind, another late-medieval morality play; and Ludus Coventriae, the N-Town mystery cycle plays. The allegory also possibly influenced the Tale of Telaphus and Teucer from book 3 of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis [The Lover’s Confession].

The Castle of Love was also a popular concept, but the specific influences of Grosseteste’s work are harder to trace and perhaps impossible to prove because the concept was already commonplace when Grosseteste adapted it. Sajavaara points out that the motif of the castle of the body and the idea of Jesus entering the Virgin Mary’s castle-body were prevalent in the homiletic tradition, making Grosseteste’s particular influence unclear. Wheatley likewise acknowledges the difficulty in identifying Grosseteste’s impact with any precision but notes that “later developments in the Castle of Love certainly show the popularity of the motif and demonstrate that, by the later Middle Ages, it had become far more widespread and had many modes of application, both serious and lighthearted in intent.” The Castle of Love motif also had secular interpretations where the Castle of Love could be an allegory for the lady’s heart or virginity, and the motif involved a siege, something Grosseteste’s poem only alludes to in the moment when the narrator knocks at the gate pleading for the Virgin Mary to let him in so he can escape the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. This fin amor tradition appeared in pageants that included a mock siege of a Castle of Love, first documented in Treviso, Italy (1214), as well as portrayals of such sieges on early-fourteenth-century ivory caskets and decorative mirror cases. Other forms included tapestries, manuscript illuminations, and table decor. Sajavaara suggests it is impossible to say definitively how much influence Grosseteste’s allegory specifically had, but that its “direct influence . . . must have been rather small.” Wheatley notes scholars’ unanimous dismissal of connections to Grosseteste in these traditions but argues for evidence of mutual interchanges between “descendants” of Grosseteste’s allegory and the pageant in Treviso. For example, similar siege-of-the-castle scenes are depicted in some English religious manuscripts such as the Peterborough Psalter and the Luttrell Psalter, which Roger Sherman Loomis claims show the particular influence of secularly themed mirror cases and “must have diverted the thoughts of many a worldly reader from his devotions, if indeed they were not put there for that very purpose.” Wheatley argues, however, that the siege illumination in the Luttrell Psalter should be interpreted in relation to the text of the psalter and notes a specific parallel with the moment in Grosseteste’s poem when the narrator knocks on the gate, as the illumination in the Luttrell Psalter sidelines the usual siege machinery in favor of a lone knight whose “left hand is raised in a fist, and [who] seems to be knocking on the door of the castle.” Arguably, The Castle of Perseverance, whose use of the Four Daughters of God allegory is mentioned above (see pp. 13–14), likewise shows the influence of Grosseteste’s Castle of Love allegory, as within the Castle of Perseverance, Mankind is besieged by the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, like the narrator in Grosseteste’s poem who asks Mary to save him from these traditional enemies. Loomis notes a fourteenth-century casket with a different “ecclesiastical version of the Siege motif,” as “the castle is surmounted by a church, and the battlements are held by nuns” who “hurl down white pellets on the powers of the world represented by six gaily clad youths mounting upon ladders to the assault.” These examples illustrate the difficulty in definitively separating the allegory’s secular and religious threads.

Regardless of its connections with other well-known traditions, the poem draws on popular oral storytelling tropes, such as direct appeals to the audience to listen, that recall the practices of live performances. Some of these are brief, a single line or part of a line, as for example, “Lustneth to me, lordynges” (line 91), “as I er tolde” (line 157), or “Lusteneth yet forther” (line 1515). Others are more elaborate, such as when the narrator offers the following rhetorical scenario in which a hypothetical question is posited that the narrator will then answer:

Nou mihte sum mon asken thus: people “Hou wolde God plede for us? did God consent to plead Hou He eny batayle nom took on And won ure righte and the Fend overcom?” regained Lustneth thenne to me nou, Listen And ichulle ow tellen hou. you (lines 1025–30)

Based on similar rhetorical flourishes in the Anglo-Norman poem, Southern suggests the Chasteau was meant to be recited aloud or even sung, but it is hard to say definitively, as such appeals were commonplace in popular tales of all types and may simply have been rhetorical flourishes meant to recall oral storytelling. Reading aloud was popular from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries, as were recitations from memory and other performances. As Nancy Mason Bradbury explains, “A given story might in the course of its career be read privately by an educated individual, read aloud from manuscripts by members of the household to their social equals, and both read aloud and recited from memory by professional performers, both to their social superiors in banquet halls and to their equals in taverns and marketplaces.” The elaborate presentation of the Vernon manuscript, described below (see pp. 31–33), nevertheless emphasizes its visual appeal — its significance as an object to be seen — thus signaling the value placed on its visual consumption.

The Manuscripts

The Middle English Castle of Love survives in three manuscripts: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1, known as the Vernon manuscript (ca. 1390–1400); London, British Library, MS Additional 22283, known as the Simeon manuscript (ca. 1400); and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Additional B. 107 (ca. 1425–50). The copies of the poem in Vernon and Simeon both leave the poem unfinished, appending a conclusion of twelve lines after line 1514. The third manuscript, MS Additional B. 107, called H in this volume, contains a more complete version of the poem, though due to a missing leaf, H lacks the lines at the end that would correspond to the final twelve lines in the Anglo-Norman source poem.

I use H as the base text for the lines missing from the end of the poem in Vernon and Simeon (lines 1515–1862), but I did not find it suitable as the source for the complete poem for several reasons. First, the poem in H appears to be a later version, farther from the original translation. There are hundreds of revisions resulting from the desire to modernize the text or because words were unknown or simply old-fashioned. Likewise, there are frequent changes in word order and the addition of words to fix the meter due to the loss of the pronunciation of final -e. Second, the overall quality of H’s text is lower in the portion overlapping with the Vernon and Simeon copies. H is missing a number of lines, including a fairly long passage of forty lines (lines 1235–74) that was unintentionally omitted, as well as some garbled passages because of the scribe’s evident misunderstanding of the exemplar at various points. Third, damage to the first three leaves means that many parts of lines 8–112 are now illegible.

Collation of variants from the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts shows that, although these versions of the poem are very close, they are not identical, despite being copied by the same scribe at roughly the same time. Where the two manuscripts diverge, Vernon has better readings in almost all cases. Moreover, the copy in the Simeon manuscript omits a few lines that the Vernon copy includes, some based on the Anglo-Norman poem and others apparently added by the translator. Thus, for lines 1–1514 of the poem I use the Vernon manuscript as the base text.

The portion of the poem elided in Vernon and Simeon includes the section describing the events leading up to the Last Judgment (based on The Fifteen Signs Before Doomsday, as mentioned above; see p. 12); the Last Judgment of the dead and the division of the saved and the damned into heaven and hell, respectively; and the visions of hell and heaven. There are two possibilities to explain the missing lines: either the exemplar used for copying the manuscripts was incomplete or the omission was deliberate. The twelve-line conclusion (given in the textual note to line 1514) appended to the poem’s end could imply the omission was intentional, yet the scribe might have composed a boilerplate conclusion if the exemplar were defective. Of particular interest is that the twelve concluding lines from the Vernon and Simeon copies of The Castle of Love have enough echoes with the final four lines of the Anglo-Norman poem to suggest they may have been a loose translation of these lines.

The closely related Vernon and Simeon manuscripts “are the largest known collective volumes of Middle English verse and prose, both physically and in number of contents.” They are nevertheless not unique but exist rather within “a tradition of ‘massy’, collective vernacular book production.” The Vernon manuscript’s size and weight illustrate just how difficult it would have been to manage physically. The manuscript weighs 22 kilograms (about 48.75 pounds), with 350 leaves remaining of its probable 422 or 426 original leaves, which are each 544 × 393 mm (about 21.5 × 15.5 inches). Simeon was even larger at 585 × 400 mm (about 23 × 15.75 inches). Vernon and Simeon would have been extremely expensive to produce, given the quantity and quality of the vellum and other materials used in their composition. Most likely both books would have required “a lectern desk or table” to support them. The Vernon and Simeon manuscripts are both available for viewing online as digital facsimiles, and it is well worth examining these manuscripts in high resolution to get a sense of what the medieval readers of these massive books would have seen.

Vernon’s folios are ruled “for eighty lines of writing in each column, with an additional pair of ruled lines in the lower margins, only utilized for catchwords on the last page of each quire” and are divided into two or three columns, depending on the length of the lines being copied (two for prose or longer verse lines vs. three for shorter verse lines). (The Castle of Love is copied in three columns.) There are fifty-three quires originally made up of eight leaves apiece (except quire seventeen, which has six), though some individual leaves have been lost. The Vernon manuscript has a high level of artistic production throughout, including borders, miniatures, and decorated and historiated initials, including a twenty-two-line historiated initial (fol. 265r) showing “God the Father holding a Crucifix between angels with censers with a monk in white habit kneeling in front, holding a scroll,” which required a whole team of artists. Details of the decorated and illuminated initials in Vernon are given in the Textual Notes. Vernon’s current binding comprises heavy wooden boards, possibly medieval, covered in the nineteenth century with tooled leather, and “sewn on six double spine supports of cord, in the position of medieval thongs.”

The Vernon manuscript is from near the end of the fourteenth century and would have taken years to complete. It was copied by two scribes, designated Scribe A and Scribe B. Most of the copying was done by Scribe B (also responsible for much of the Simeon manuscript), who wrote in an Anglicana script characteristic of the mid-fourteenth century and therefore outdated by the time the manuscript was copied near the end of the century. Because Scribe B’s hand is so regular and consistent and lacks many distinguishing features, it is difficult to be sure whether it can be identified with the scribes of any other manuscripts. Simon Horobin suggests a possible association of Scribe B with Lichfield Cathedral.

Vernon’s Scribe A copied the first quire, which contains the table of contents and the translation of Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum (fols. i–viii), as well as adding rubrics and foliation to the remainder of the manuscript, which Scribe B copied (fols. 1 ff.). This division suggests that Scribe A may not have been involved until near the end of Vernon’s production. Scribe A wrote in a less regular and old-fashioned hand than Scribe B. Evidence suggests Scribe A may have been a professional scribe, like John Scriveyn, another scribe associated with both Vernon and Simeon. Although John Scriveyn did none of the copying, he “evidently had access to both manuscripts during their production.” Horobin suggests that the “unequal distribution of labour” between the scribes implies that Scribe A was a kind of supervisor for the project.

Almost all the works in Vernon are in Middle English, and N. F. Blake notes the vernacular religious focus to the manuscript. Blake categorizes the contents into five units: “legendary material,” “prayers and devotional material,” “general didactic material,” “devotional material of a more mystical nature,” and “short devotional lyrics.” A look at the manuscript shows that The Castle of Love comes between part III of The South English Legendary: Legend of St. Michael (beginning Þe riȝte put of helle) and Ypotis, a dialogue consisting of a “mishmash of biblical facts, pseudo-scientific lore, and proverbs” popular in the Middle Ages.

Scholars locate the Vernon manuscript’s production in the West Midlands, with more or less specificity. Horobin believes the manuscript was professionally produced by lay scribes and locates its production at Lichfield Cathedral. In contrast, A. I. Doyle identifies a connection with the Cistercian abbey of Stoneleigh, Warwickshire. On the basis of the illumination styles, Lynda Dennison suggests a West Midlands monastic venue for the artistic production. Wendy Scase conjectures a possible patron for the Vernon manuscript, William Beauchamp (the brother of Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick).

Between its production and its donation to the Bodleian Library in about 1677 by Colonel Edward Vernon, the Vernon manuscript was owned by an earlier Vernon, Walter Vernon, whose marriage to Marie Littleton (1583) is recorded on fol. 413v, together with the dates of their children’s births (1584–85); additional names, some partially missing where a large margin of the page has been cut off, are written below these “possibly by another hand,” and further down, yet another hand recorded a second “list of nine Christian names, each bracketed with two more cut off, probably the godparents, in another generation or kinship.” Other names linked to the Vernon family are written on folios 413v (Thomas Brooke the senior) and 53r (Mary Harpur), as well as some illegible scribbles on folios 316v and 317v; the name “Gruffith Smyth” is written on folio 343v.

In contrast to the Vernon manuscript’s impressive size and artistic presentation, MS Additional B. 107 (H), dating to probably the second quarter of the fifteenth century, and possibly not much before 1450, is a small manuscript, just 155 × 120 mm (about 6 × 4.75 inches), roughly the size of a mass-market paperback. It has spare decoration consisting mainly of occasional two-line decorated initials done in blue ink with red flourishes, infrequent paraph marks, and on folio 35v the “remnants of a drawing in black ink coloured red and blue” that “appears to have been pasted on.” The Castle of Love is the only work in the manuscript, which consists of forty-six vellum leaves arranged in four quires ranging from ten to twelve leaves, with one or more leaves missing at the end of the manuscript, leaving the poem unfinished. Folio 46r is the back pastedown, with a modern note in pencil that says, “An exceedingly rare MS, only one other copy of wch. is known to exist, but the present containing a superior text. The last leaf is wanting & the first few leaves are slightly discoloured by galls, but otherwise the MS is in a fine & perfect co[ndi]tion. Wharton has mentioned [t]he copy in the celebrated Ve[rnon] MS no other being k[nown] [to] him. Note by Halli[we]ll,” and below this is written in brackets, “[an important note].” There is penwork on the top of folio 10r in black ink and additional writing in the left margin of folio 45v, which I am unable to decipher.

The poem is written by a single scribe in a regular Anglicana hand in one column, usually of twenty lines (though ranging from eighteen to twenty-two), and couplets are bracketed in red ink in the right margin; the numbering is modern pencil. The current binding is early though not medieval (after 1520) and consists of “plain white parchment with marks of ruling . . . cut and pasted onto board but not properly mitred,” and the binding is “[s]ewn with four white leather thongs, probably in their original positions.” The provenance of H is unknown. When James Orchard Halliwell first edited the manuscript in the mid-nineteenth century (1849), he simply noted in his preface that “[t]he text of this edition is chiefly taken from a manuscript in private hands.” The manuscript showed up at the sale of John Fuller Russell’s library in 1885 (after his death in 1884), where it was purchased by the firm Bernard Quaritch; the Bodleian Library purchased the manuscript in September 1885.

Previous Editions and Scholarship

Nineteenth-century scholars focused mainly on making the poem accessible through editions of the Anglo-Norman and Middle English poems. The earliest edition of the Anglo-Norman poem was produced by M. Cooke in 1852 under the title Carmen de creatione Mundi. Cooke also includes in his volume a poem called the Vie de Sainte Marie Egyptienne and one of the Middle English translations of the Chasteau, The Myrour of Lewed Men, which he titles The Romance of Chasteau D’amour. Cooke offers minimal context for his texts in the form of a preface that contains a few details about Grosseteste’s life and works and identifies the manuscripts used to produce the volume. There are no textual or explanatory notes. Later scholars criticized Cooke’s edition of the Anglo-Norman poem as flawed due to inaccuracies.

The earliest edition of the Middle English Castle of Love is Halliwell’s 1849 limited printing of the poem based on H. This edition is not lineated, emendations are not noted, and Halliwell supplied without noting them the missing or illegible lines from Vernon, including the long passage consisting of lines 1235–74. The edition by R. F. Weymouth, published in 1864, is not reader-friendly for present-day audiences. It does not modernize the letterforms and reproduces the abbreviations rather than expanding them. The edition has only a brief preface that discusses editorial practices but nothing more, as the introduction was published separately as a journal article. There are a few explanatory notes mixed in with the textual notes, but these are geared toward scholars rather than students. The collation of variants in the textual notes is incomplete. There is a brief glossary. Weymouth’s edition presents the Vernon manuscript’s version of the poem, which, like that in Simeon, includes only the first 1514 lines plus a twelve-line conclusion. The edition by Carl Horstmann with marginal notes by F. J. Furnivall, published in 1892, likewise presents the text of Vernon, recording in a separate section the variants from H, as well as the end of the poem, but these are supplied from Halliwell’s edition rather than from the manuscript. The text of the poem is presented without an introduction, and textual notes collated with Simeon are published in a separate volume. The presentation of the poem includes some marginal notes suggesting corrected readings of words in the poem, detailing the topic of the poem at different points, and offering comparisons with the edition of the Anglo-Norman poem by Cooke, although there are no explanatory notes. The Horstmann-Furnivall edition does not modernize the letterforms but does expand abbreviations.

J. Murray’s 1918 edition of the Anglo-Norman text titled the poem Le Château d’Amour and included a much more extensive editorial apparatus, with an introduction covering Grosseteste’s life and works, descriptions and classifications of the Anglo-Norman manuscripts, various linguistic aspects of the poem’s language (e.g., versification, phonology, pronunciation, syntax, morphology), the date of the poem, a summary of the Chasteau, the poem’s sources, and its translations and influence. Murray’s edition also includes textual notes, a few explanatory notes, and a brief glossary. In 2002 Evelyn Anne Mackie produced a modern edition for her Ph.D. dissertation, which includes examination of the manuscripts and their provenance; discussion of Grosseteste and the poem’s likely audience; analysis of the poem’s text, date, contemporary literary context, sources, and the allegories; textual notes; a brief glossary; and an appendix containing the Latin prologues.

The most recent edition of the Middle English poem is by Kari Sajavaara, published in 1967. This volume is very helpful for scholars but less so for students. It includes all four Middle English translations of the Chasteau d’amour and offers a wealth of information. The introduction has sections on Grosseteste’s life and works, various aspects of the Anglo-Norman Chasteau, and each of the four English translations or adaptations. Sajavaara’s extensive discussion of the Anglo-Norman poem includes sections detailing manuscripts and editions, authorship and date, a summary, and analyses of the general theme and the specific allegories of the Four Daughters of God and the Castle of Love. The volume includes introductions to each Middle English version that encompass relevant details of the manuscripts (including descriptions, provenance, language, and their interrelation and relative authority); discuss a given translation’s date, dialect, and authorship; and examine versification. The final portion of Sajavaara’s introduction addresses issues of translation, including the relation between the Anglo-Norman and the four Middle English poems, translation techniques, changes the translations make to the message of the poem, narrative or rhetorical devices used in translating, and the translators’ mistakes. In the editions of the poems, the letterforms are not modernized, and there are no marginal glosses (although there is a small glossary). The volume also includes textual and explanatory notes for each Middle English poem. Sajavaara provides the textual variants at the bottom of the page throughout the poem and provides an additional mixture of explanatory and textual notes toward the end of the volume. The notes detail biblical allusions, some historical and contextual information, and comparisons with the Anglo-Norman poem, as well as discussions of word use, emendations, and prosody. Although it is possible to borrow it in digital form from the Internet Archive, a physical copy of the edition is difficult to access.

Early scholarship often explored sources, analogues, and influences, or comparisons between versions of the poem from different manuscripts. Weymouth’s “Bishop Grosseteste’s Castle of Love” (1862), published separately from his edition of the Castle (1864), identifies the Anglo-Norman poem as the source for the Middle English one but then focuses mainly on understanding the relation between copies of the Castle of Love in the surviving manuscripts through an analysis of select passages. Hugo Haenisch’s dissertation (1884) on the Cursor Mundi examines the Chasteau as a source for parts of the Cursor Mundi using side-by-side comparison of passages from the Cursor with the Chasteau. The deeper contextualization and the higher quality texts provided by the twentieth-century editions reinvigorated scholarly interest in the Anglo-Norman and Middle English poems, but much of the twentieth-century scholarship still centered on the preoccupations of sources, analogues, influences, and manuscript interrelation, as in Sister Mary Immaculate Creek’s dissertation, “The Sources and Influence of the Chasteau d’Amour” (1941). Sajavaara explicitly extends Haenisch’s work by exploring additional passages that show the Chasteau’s influence on the Cursor Mundi in “The Use of Robert Grosseteste’s Château d’amour as a Source of the Cursor Mundi: Additional Evidence” (1967).

Two of the most fruitful strands of scholarship — both early and late — have explored the religious allegories of the Four Daughters of God and the Castle of Love, discussed in detail, above (see pp. 13–18). The initial works on these topics, like other early scholarship, focused on teasing out the origins of the allegories, discussing their changes over time, and exploring the relation between different sources and analogues. The first in-depth exploration of the Four Daughters of God allegory is Hope Traver’s study, The Four Daughters of God (1907), which details the origin and evolution of the allegory through nine strands of its development. Traver includes a chapter on the Chasteau, contextualizing it within a group of other works and exploring their interrelation. The focus of the discussion is not interpretive but rather seeks to identify the works from which Grosseteste’s poem borrowed and those the Chasteau influenced in turn. Building on Traver’s work, Creek’s later essay “The Four Daughters of God in the Gesta Romanormum and the Court of Sapience” (1942) explores the interrelation of several works containing the allegory, including Grosseteste’s Chasteau. Mattias Tveitane continues the interest in sources and analogues in his discussion of the Chasteau as one possible source for the Old Norse didactic work the King’s Mirror (Speculum Regale / Konungs skuggsjá) in “The ‘Four Daughters of God’ in the Old Norse King’s Mirror” (1972). The seminal work on the Castle allegory is Roberta Douglas Cornelius’s Ph.D. dissertation, “The Figurative Castle” (1930). Within the larger study, Cornelius covers the history of the representation of Mary’s body as a castle in her chapter “The Blessed Virgin as a Castle,” where she contextualizes Grosseteste’s use of the allegory briefly within this chronology. In “The ‘Castle of Love’ in English Folk-Songs,” Sajavaara examines the popularity of the motif of the Castle of Love in a number of ballads, acknowledging that “the similarity with Robert Grosseteste’s Castle of Love is only very vague” (1972).

Though later explorations of the allegories or other religious themes often maintain an interest in the influences of Grosseteste’s poem, the focus of this more recent scholarship is on understanding the interpretive implications for the later work. In Poetry Does Theology: Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl-Poet (2001), for example, Jim Rhodes first explores how the Chasteau reflects Grosseteste’s theology, especially in the Four Daughters allegory, and then examines in turn Langland’s use of the allegory and its theological implications in Piers Plowman. Nicholas Watson’s “William Langland Reads Robert Grosseteste” (2017) analyzes Piers Plowman’s “sense of its place in a continuing tradition of English pastoral literature,” exploring how the allegories of Mary’s body as the Castle and the Four Daughters of God, as well as the debate between Jesus and the Devil, reflect Piers Plowman’s reception of theological ideas from Grosseteste’s poem, where we might see Langland “write around and even against the Chasteau.” In Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe (1992), R. W. Southern considers the poem primarily a pastoral work intended to explain complex theology for lay people, including the difficult concepts of natura naturans (God as the creator) and natura naturata (nature as the creation), discussed above (see pp. 22–25). Rebecca Davis’s Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature (2016) similarly investigates how Langland’s use of these same concepts in his portrait of Kynde in Piers Plowman shows the influence of Grosseteste’s theology from the Anglo-Norman poem.

The idea of the architectural allegory of the Castle of Love is likewise a productive one, explored by Jill Mann in “Allegorical Buildings in Mediaeval Literature,” where she examines a number of uses of allegorical structures, contextualizing Grosseteste’s among them. Several critics investigating the architectural motif of the Castle of Love as Mary’s body interpret the allegory in terms of what the poem suggests about Mary’s virginity. In The Idea of the Castle in Medieval England, Abigail Wheatley enumerates biblical allusions in the Chasteau’s description of the Castle of Love and explores the implications of the figuration as a device for remembering theological concepts while at the same time connecting the castle’s gate to Mary’s virginity. In “A Fortress and a Shield,” an essay exploring the Chasteau’s treatment of the Virgin Mary, Christiania Whitehead examines the Castle allegory in relation to various contemporary and historical doctrinal and theological underpinnings of the cult of the Virgin Mary. In her full-length study, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory, Whitehead links the treatment of Mary’s virginity in the Castle of Love allegory to religious works written for women, such as the Ancrene Wisse, and explores two competing versions of the besieged castle in medieval literature: the courtly and the religious. In “The ‘Romance’ of the Castle of Love,” Jane Zatta discusses the poem’s use of courtly love and medieval romance motifs in a feudal context and explores the reception of Mary from Grosseteste’s Chasteau in the Cursor Mundi and Myrour of Lewed Men. Jennifer Jahner takes a look at the feudal backdrop in the poem through the lens of its legal ramifications in Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta, where she analyzes Grosseteste’s use of English property law in relation to salvation history in the Chasteau.

Another important theological topic in recent scholarship is the poem’s treatment of the two theories of the “Devil’s rights,” of Christ as a ransom for Adam, and the Devil’s abuse of power, which I discuss above (see pp. 21–22). James McEvoy, Creek, and Sajavaara, respectively, see the poem combining the two theories, but C. W. Marx makes a different case in The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England. Focusing on both the debate between Christ and the Devil and the courtroom arguments of the Four Daughters of God, Marx explores how Grosseteste treats this issue in the Chasteau through the lens of his Dictum 10. There, Grosseteste “describes Christ as a ‘buyer’ who bought the human race from God and the Devil,” but his theory of ransom differs from that of “Gregory of Nyssa[,] where the ransom is paid to the Devil and no mention is made of payment to God”; rather, Grosseteste holds that payment for releasing the prisoner “must be made to the king (God) not the jailer (the Devil).” In the Chasteau’s debate between Christ and the Devil, Marx suggests that “Grosseteste has modernized this picture of the defeat of the Devil by showing that the Devil had no right over humanity.” In the Four Daughters of God episode, likewise “[t]he ransom is not to be paid to the torturer (the Devil) but to the king, and the king’s son does not say that he will pay a ransom to the jailer but that he will suffer the judgement of death, in place of the prisoner, in order to reconcile the dictates of justice with mercy,” and “[u]ltimately the Devil is irrelevant to the redemption.”

Other recent scholars examine the manuscript tradition, gleaning information about audiences, book production, and ownership through the extant physical copies (in contrast to earlier manuscript work, such as Weymouth’s, that focused on the relation between copies of the poem). In the opening to her translation into Modern English of the Anglo-Norman version of the poem, Mackie uses the surviving copies of the work, as well as medieval library inventories, to hypothesize about the audiences of the poem. Mackie’s essay “Scribal Intervention and the Question of Audience” also identifies ways that scribal “editing” in the Chasteau reveals information about audiences through an examination of specific interventions by scribes in the manuscripts. In “From Manual to Miscellany: Stages in the Commercial Copying of Vernacular Literature in England,” Andrew Taylor explores what the surviving Anglo-Norman and Middle English manuscripts of the poem suggest about audiences and book production in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Taylor’s piece “Was Grosseteste the Father of English Literature?” shows how important the figure of Grosseteste was in the development of English commercial book production. Anna Siebach-Larsen then brings the threads of Grosseteste’s theological messaging and manuscript production of his work together in her essay “Structures of Thought in Robert Grosseteste’s Chasteau d’amour and the Tateshal Miscellany.” Siebach-Larsen analyzes the presentation of a manuscript owned by Joan Tateshal to understand the relation of audience to manuscript production and the relative authority of a manuscript’s patron in relation to the work being commissioned. This particular commission, Grosseteste’s Chasteau, is intended to transform the reader “through the material workings of vision and light.” Siebach-Larsen investigates the participatory aspects of Grosseteste’s pastoral project of transformation in the poem as realized through Joan, who both commissions and reads the text, going so far as to have herself painted into the Chasteau’s opening line standing next to Grosseteste in a historiated initial, thus participating in the poem’s transformative action of salvation as both patron and audience.

Mackie and Maureen B. M. Boulton, respectively, offer Modern English prose translations of the Anglo-Norman poem. Although these translations have helped make the poem somewhat accessible to broader audiences, the poem’s relative obscurity continues to make teaching the work impractical and scholarship on it challenging. This new edition thus aims to offer more to present-day audiences of students, teachers, and scholars alike. The features that help readers include generous marginal glosses in the Middle English poem and explanatory notes geared toward students; an Appendix with the Anglo-Norman text, together with a facing-page verse translation; and ample textual notes to both poems for scholars.

Editorial Practices

I have edited the poem according to the standard METS practices of following modern rules for capitalization, punctuation, and word division. I silently expand scribal abbreviations, regularize the spelling of i/j and u/v, change ff to F or f where applicable, modernize the archaic letterforms thorn (þ > th) and yogh (ȝ > g, gh, h, y, or z, as appropriate), and change þe to thee when the meaning is “you.” Words that begin with I followed by a punctus are written without a space or hyphen, following modern editorial practice (e.g., ichulle, ihud, isome). As is common with many fifteenth-century hands, the scribe of H uses a number of strokes that I disregard as otiose, including flourishes on some final letters (-d, -g, -n), as well as barred h and ll. I expand the loop on the letter r in both medial and final position to -e, however, which Sajavaara did not. Variant readings in the Textual Notes retain their original letterforms, although scribal abbreviations are still expanded. Throughout the poem, I note folio numbers in the margin. In most cases, the line breaks I add in the poem immediately precede decorated initials as they occur in the Vernon manuscript until line 1514, after which I follow H. In the first 1514 lines, I also note marginalia from Vernon, such as notes for exempla, in the Textual Notes.

The Textual Notes record emendations and note variants among the three manuscripts, as well as describe decorated initials and paraph marks or pilcrows (¶) in the base manuscript (V or H). In addition, damage and staining in H renders portions of some lines illegible (particularly on the first several folios), and I note wherever there are lacunae. The Textual Notes do not record spelling variations between manuscripts except when catchwords or -phrases are already cited to note more significant differences. Previous editors’ brackets indicating their insertions or changes have been silently elided when noting their emendations. I emend when necessary for sense or when evidence points to an obvious omission or change, but I do not attempt to correct meter or line length. In creating a hybrid of the texts in Vernon and H, I am not presenting something close to an actual surviving copy; my goal is to offer modern readers the best version of as complete a poem as I can.

A Note on the Appendix

I include the Chasteau d’amour together with a facing-page translation in this volume to enable easy comparison between the Middle English and Anglo-Norman versions of the poem. My verse translation is relatively literal and matches the Anglo-Norman line by line. This sometimes makes for awkward syntax in Modern English, but sticking close to the original assists readers who want to use the Anglo-Norman text but may not be familiar with the dialect or medieval French more generally. The Anglo-Norman poem survives in eighteen manuscripts, which can be divided into two groups, one of which is more closely related to the Middle English translation. Of this stemma, three manuscripts stand out as most useful to this volume: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 399 (1300), referred to as B; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 652 (second half of thirteenth century), identified as O; and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 471B (ca. 1300), here called L. Although none of the surviving copies could have supplied the translator’s exemplar, it probably came from the stemma that includes these manuscripts. In this grouping, B and L are the best texts, but B has fewer intentional changes, its variations due more to scribal errors. The versions in B and O are closely related to one another, but B is a better copy than O, with fewer errors and missing lines, and I thus use B as my base text. Although B and O are nearer the earlier stemma than L, they nevertheless leave out some lines that the translator used. As the most reliable of the remaining copies in the stemma, L is useful for supplying missing lines and corrections.

Bodley 399 (MS B) is an English manuscript containing 124 leaves (vi + 118 fols.) of 247 × 170 mm (about 9.75 × 6.7 inches), written in two columns of thirty-seven to thirty-eight lines with some decorated initials and rubrics. It was copied by two scribes, one who wrote folios 1–31v, and a second who copied folios 32–116v. Except for some brief theological notes in Latin on folios 116r (after the end of the Chasteau) and 117r, all the works are in Anglo-Norman. The manuscript contains seventeen quires, mostly eight leaves apiece (the first and the fifteenth have six, the second has one, the ninth has nine, and the seventeenth has four), plus a smaller fragment, folio 118 (glued to folio 117). It has rubrics, running titles, and some catchwords, and the decoration consists of alternating red and blue initials with penwork flourishes. The binding of the manuscript, though old, does not appear to be original; the boards are made of cardboard covered in light brown leather with darker speckles throughout. The decoration of the binding includes a fine double line impressed around the outside of both front and back boards, crossing in the corners, with cold-stamped leaf and floral details (much better preserved on the front) running vertically along the edges next to the spine. The portion of the manuscript containing the Chasteau was copied by the second scribe in a careful and regular English bookhand. The poem begins with a five-line initial K in dark blue, elaborately decorated in blue, red, and yellow and embellished with penwork flourishes within the letter that also extend across the top of the page and down the left margin an additional eight lines. Interspersed throughout the remainder of the poem are two-line decorated initials alternating between blue embellished with red penwork and red embellished with blue penwork (some also with light brown or yellow accents); the penwork flourishes decorate the space within the letters and extend up and down the left margins. In addition to theological notes, there is a record of payment in a sixteenth-century hand on folio 116r: “Follar hawe resywed of hes wages for this quartar the xx of july iis id” (i.e., 2 shillings, 1 penny). Folios 116v–117r also contain a number of pen trials, including the notation “In my beginning” on folio 116v. A notation at the top of folio 115v reads “Concede nos famulorum” [Grant our famulorum].

Taylor suggests that Bodley 399 may have been produced like other collections of vernacular texts as part of the commercial book trade; rather than a “bespoke” manuscript, readers might request “an elegant collection of fashionable and varied material by making a personal selection of pre-copied fascicles.” Most of the market for commercially produced books were religious texts, like this “handsome and substantial” collection. The manuscript begins with La lumere as lais [Light for the Laity] by Pierre d’Abernon (also known as Pierre de Peckham of Fetcham), an Anglo-Norman didactic religious poem of 13,960 lines that covers a range of theological topics and survives in twenty copies (some fragmentary). Rauf de Lenham’s Art de Kalender, a computus text, follows this, at the end of which is appended eight lines identifying the current date as 1300. Next comes Grosseteste’s Chasteau d’amour, followed by what was originally a fragment of another copy of La lumere as lais (fol. 118) from the early fourteenth century that was discovered in the nineteenth century. On folio iii is a note that appears to be written by Sir Thomas Bodley, recording a gift most likely given between 1605 and 1611: “Donum Francisci Cleeri Militis” [Gift of Sir Francis Cleer].

The editorial practices for the Anglo-Norman text are substantially the same as noted for the Middle English poem earlier in this Introduction. I regularize the spelling of i/j and u/v; silently expand abbreviations; and follow modern rules for capitalization, punctuation, and word division. In addition, I have added diacritics where appropriate: the acute accent on é; the diaeresis (French tréma) on ï, ÿ, ë, or ü; and the cedilla on ç. Throughout the poem, I note folio numbers for B in the margin; in most cases the line breaks I add immediately precede the decorated initials in B.

I collate B in the Textual Notes to the Chasteau with L, as well as with Murray’s early-twentieth-century edition, which is based on a manuscript from the group less closely related to the English poem. Although I consulted O, I do not include it in the Textual Notes, as most differences with B are errors or misreadings. I have included Murray’s edition because it is the text scholars have long quoted and relied on for the Anglo-Norman poem, and it will be helpful to note the differences between that edition and the text in this volume. I emend when necessary for sense or when evidence points to an obvious omission or change. The scribe of B usually expunges words and letters by writing dots below what should be deleted; in the Textual Notes, these are marked with the strikeout feature, as with other cancellations (except in cases where a single minim is expunged). As with the Middle English poem, variant readings in the Textual Notes retain their original letterforms, and scribal abbreviations are silently expanded. I note decorated initials and paraph marks or pilcrows (¶) where they occur in B. Notes are not included specifically to record variations in spelling or for variants between ki and ke (qui and que), as their spellings in Anglo-Norman are inconsistent and overlapping, and do not necessarily reflect grammatical differences.