Papers by Anne Marie D'Arcy
[The University of Leicester]. Leicester Research Archive. ...
Modern Philology, 2008
Deduced from Holocene Marine Terraces along the Coast of Sagami and Suruga Bays, Central Japan1) ... more Deduced from Holocene Marine Terraces along the Coast of Sagami and Suruga Bays, Central Japan1) Yoshiaki MATSUSHIMA2) Neotectonics of the coastal areas of Sagami and Suruga Bays in the South Fossa Magna region are diseussed with special reference to Holocene marine terraces of the area, where the Eurasian Plate is considered to have collided with the Izu Peninsula on the Philippene Plate along the Sagami and Suruga troughs. In the coastal areas of the Oiso Hills, the Miura Peninsula and the south tip of the Boso Peninsula, the adjacent areas northeast of the Sagami trough, there are several sets of Holocene marine terraces, suggesting remarkable upheavals. Active faults are developed throughout these areas, a notable one of which is manifested by the Kohzu-Matsuda fault known as the northern extension of the Sagami trough. Along the Kohzu-Matsuda fault, the upheaval of the Oiso Hills is recognized at the rate of about 3.4m in about 1,000 years. The area of the Izu Peninsula is characterized by a downward movement of the west coast adjacent to the Suruga trough, and an upheaval of the east coast. A terrace of the maximum phase of the Jomon transgression is found only on the northeastern coast. On the southern coast, Holocene terraces of the highest level are dated from 3,000 years B.P. On the west side of the Suruga trough, crustal movements are prominent on the coast of the delta of the Fuji River, which is regarded as the northern extension of the Suruga trough. That is manifested by an upheaval of the lwabuchi area in the west and a subsidence of the area of Ukishimagahara in the east. The amount of the dislocation in the area seems to be much larger than that of the Kohzu-Matsuda fault, and to decrease towards the Omaesaki point.
Middle English Lyrics, 2018
Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems (Cambridge, 2018), pp.109-121. , Sep 21, 2018
She has published on Pearl, Charles d'Orléans, and the alliterative Morte Arthure. Current projec... more She has published on Pearl, Charles d'Orléans, and the alliterative Morte Arthure. Current projects include an edition of a fifteenth-century lyric anthology, Lambeth Palace, MS 853; a Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism: Medieval English Literature; and a study of the reception of the Song of Songs in medieval English literature and culture.
The Review of English Studies, 2016
Joyce Studies Annual, 2013
The Review of English Studies, 2015
It has frequently been suggested that Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum challenges the An... more It has frequently been suggested that Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum challenges the Anglican consensus that women could not participate in the priesthood. This article argues that the poem is compatible with Anglican orthodoxy. Lanyer is careful to present the authority of the Church as inhering not immediately in her patron, Margaret Clifford, but in Clifford's soul, which is an allegorical personification of the Church as the bride of Christ. This representation of Clifford draws upon the Song of Songs and the veneration of Mary as a spiritual priest, descended from the line of Aaron. By projecting the spiritual priesthood of Mary as the Church, who is the bride of Christ, onto Clifford’s soul, Lanyer presents Mary’s spiritual priesthood as open to her female readers. This distinguishes her concept of Mary's spiritual priesthood from contemporary Roman Catholic traditions, where the unique nature of the Virgin’s sacerdotal role is particularly associated with her Immaculate Conception. However, Lanyer treads a careful line in relation to the highly contentious matter of the ecclesiological role of women in the Church of England. Anglican apologists maintained that a woman might hold civil, if not spiritual, jurisdiction as a monarch; Roman Catholic polemicists, on the other hand, argued that the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy was heretical. Anglicans were frequently derided as Peputiani—a pejorative term ascribed to Montanists who held that women could participate in Church government—in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century polemic. Through adroit use of sapiential and Mariological imagery, Lanyer sidesteps these controversies concerning Church government. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press 2015; all rights reserved
The Review of English Studies, 2013
While previous studies of Leopold Bloom’s relationship with Freemasonry have approached the topic... more While previous studies of Leopold Bloom’s relationship with Freemasonry have approached the topic quite generally, this article examines Joyce’s precise deployment of Masonic terminology, with particular reference to the Grand Lodge of Ireland and the higher or additional degrees and orders of Irish Freemasonry affiliated to it. It also considers the portrayal of Bloom in the light of judeo-maconnerie, reanimated in fin-de-siecle France by Leo Taxil, albeit culminating in the Affaire des Fiches of 1904–1905. Joyce depicts Bloom as an erstwhile Freemason, employing disguised symbolism to suggest he remains faithful to the fraternal ideal of Freemasonry, and its charitable traditions, in spite of the social hierarchies of contemporary Irish Freemasonry and his unaffiliated status. That Bloom is no longer affiliated to a lodge does not ameliorate the hostility directed toward him as a Jewish Freemason, indicative of the pernicious influence of judeo-maconnerie, not only in France, but also in contemporary Ireland. Subsequent to the publication of Victor Hugo’s Les travailleurs de la mer in 1866, the principal symbol of this putative alliance between Jews and Freemasons is a monstrous, blood-sucking octopus, sometimes envisioned with two heads. Although Bloom does not comprehend AE’s cryptic allusion to this symbol, ironically, he remains the living embodiment of judeo-maconnerie as far as some of his fellow Irishmen are concerned.
Dublin James Joyce Journal, 2014
Piercing the Veil: Der reine Tor, the Grail Quest, and the Language Question in 'Araby' Thy mouth... more Piercing the Veil: Der reine Tor, the Grail Quest, and the Language Question in 'Araby' Thy mouth hadst thou thought to open, Of these wonders hadst asked thine host, Great fame had been thine. But I tell thee, Thou hadst thou this fair chance lost! 1 That 'Araby' is influenced by the topoi of medieval romance is a well-established commonplace in itself, but there has been little attempt to address the precise nature of Joyce's engagement with Arthurian literature, specifically the motif of the Holy Grail, from his formative years as a writer to his concept of the Grail legend in Finnegans Wake. 2 Since the mid-nineteenth century, numerous critical studies have attempted to determine the ultimate source and meaning of the Holy Grail as a symbol, which are generally classed into five theories of origin: the ritual or anthropological interpretation; the Celtic or folkloristic interpretation; the Christian interpretation; the Oriental interpretation, and the psychological interpretation. Although Joyce was resolutely chary of the 'Cultic twalette' (FW 344.12), particularly the theosophical inklings of Dublin mystagogues as we shall see, it would appear that in writing Finnegans Wake, he accepted the ritual theory endorsed by his steadfast advocate and advisor, the great medievalist, Ernst Robert Curtius, albeit from a sceptically humorous perspective. Throughout the many, risk-ridden years he worked on Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, finally published in 1948, Curtius continued to equate
<p>This essay examines the legal contexts surrounding the protests against Queen Victoria&#... more <p>This essay examines the legal contexts surrounding the protests against Queen Victoria's Ireland visit in 1900, referred to repeatedly in James Joyce's writing, notably in "Island of Saints and Sages" and in Leopold Bloom's internal monologue in <italic>Ulysses.</italic> The essay recounts how Maude Gonne wrote a scathing article about the royal visit,"The Famine Queen," for <italic>The United Irishmen</italic>, which was immediately suppressed over concerns of sedition. This in turn led to Gonne's criminal libel case, for which Arthur Griffith's testimony against Ramsay Colles, publisher and editor of <italic>The</italic><italic>Irish Figaro</italic>, was crucial, D'arcy locates hitherto overlooked references to these developments all over <italic>Ulysses </italic>and the<italic>Wake</italic>.</p>
[The University of Leicester]. Leicester Research Archive. ...
... Authors: D&#x27;Arcy, Anne Marie. Issue Date: 2005. Citation: Studies in late medieval an... more ... Authors: D&#x27;Arcy, Anne Marie. Issue Date: 2005. Citation: Studies in late medieval and early Renaissance texts in honour of John Scattergood : &#x27;The key of all good remembrance&#x27; / AnneMarie D&#x27;Arcy &amp; Alan J. Fletcher, editors, pp. 100-120. Published by Four Courts, 2005. ...
[The University of Leicester]. Leicester Research Archive. ...
[The University of Leicester]. Leicester Research Archive. ...
James Joyce and the Arts, Apr 15, 2020
Dublin James Joyce Journal
Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C, 2014
ABSTRACT
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Papers by Anne Marie D'Arcy
Since the mid-nineteenth century, numerous critics have attempted to determine the ultimate source of the grail legend. Perhaps the most influential strand in early critical studies, particularly outside academia, was the Ritual or Anthropological theory of origin, which sometimes flowed into the ‘cultic twalette’ (FW 344.12) of the Celtic or Folkloristic theory. Critics who espoused the Ritual Theory were inspired by the winking lights of J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough, a work which, as T.S. Eliot acknowledged, ‘influenced our generation profoundly’. They suggested that the concept of the grail sprang from the putative rites associated with a vegetation god, typified by such figures as Adonis, Attis and Osiris, who dies each year in the winter only to be ritually revived each spring. This ritual, esoteric theory of the grail was developed by Jessie Weston and W.A. Nitze in his earlier works. In 1909 Nitze published an article called ‘The Fisher King in the Grail Romances’, while in the same year Weston published the concluding part of her Legend of Sir Perceval. Although these two critics worked out their versions of the theory independently, their results agree in the most essential respects.
Much ink has been spilled in libation over Eliot’s use of the Ritual Theory in The Wasteland, and both Stephen and Bloom make several references to its central tenets in Ulysses. Joyce also appropriated aspects of the Ritual Theory in Finnegans Wake, albeit from a sceptically humorous perspective at a time when his steadfast advocate, the great medievalist, Ernst Robert Curtius, still equated the grail quest with the rite of spring: a Geschlectsmysterium through which ‘as through an open sluice, the fertility cult of the earliest ages flows once again into the speculation of the Christian West’. However, this paper highlights Joyce’s essentially Christian concept of the grail in ‘Araby’: as a chalice of unattainable knowledge and unfulfilled desire, and Joyce’s construction of the boy as a type of Perceval, the original grail hero. Here, Joyce draws specifically on the topos of der reine Tor, or le pur simple, which not only defines Perceval in medieval romance from his inception in Le conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes, but also in Wagner’s adaptation of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. In ‘Araby’, the boy is indeed a ‘young reine’ (FW 64.16), and like Perceval he fails in his quest, ‘purely simply’ (FW 241.25) because of his inability to ask the right question before darkness falls on the hall, and the opportunity is lost forever. Moreover, as in the Perceval romances, this inability to pierce the veil, to fulfil the onomastic potential of the grail hero’s name, is rooted in the orientalized locus, and the question of language, or in this instance, the language question. At the close of ‘Araby’, the boy’s eminently medieval anagnoresis involves the sudden recognition of the alien nature of the very words he fails to speak as a ‘purr esimple’ (FW 561.9).
However, this idea of Saorstát Éireann as ‘Saint Scholarland’ is subjected to unremitting scrutiny in Finnegans Wake. For Joyce, the Book of Kells is the apogee of Insular culture, being ‘the most purely Irish thing we have’, yet not produced in Ireland. Stemming from the spiritual and intellectual impact of the Irish on Britain during the Insular period, it transcends narrow ideas of nationalism in terms of its language, decoration and provenance. This impact extended across Europe, leaving a cultural legacy still acknowledged on the Continent during Joyce’s youth, but written out of British history and folk memory because it belied anti-Irish, colonial propaganda. Joyce was aware of this purposeful excision of ‘monkish learning’, but he was equally wary of the narrow vision of the Insular period propounded by D.P. Moran and Pádraig Pearse, who also disregarded the Irish contribution to British literature and learning. This narrow vision, which ignored the hybridity of Insular culture, dictated the iconography of the Congress, burlesqued in Finnegans Wake. The new Ireland, reanimated by the intellectual confidence of the Insular period envisioned in ‘Saints and Sages’, proved radically different to the state which emerged once the ‘price partitional of twenty six and six’ has been paid.
The association between lepra and luxuria is a recurrent theme in the medieval exegetical tradition and is found in a number of patristic sources. Leprosy was generally regarded as a punishment for sin, specifically sexual sin: ‘Lepra corporis, luxuriae imago’, as Adam Scotus of Prémontré puts it at the close of the twelfth century. R. I. Moore states that the ‘statutes of leper-houses contain many allegations of their promiscuous inclinations, and of the endeavours of those in authority to restrain them ... The regular prohibitions of the admission of lepers to brothels are the clearest statement of the belief that the disease was sexually transmitted, and since syphilis was one of the diseases that went under the name of lepra this conviction was, of course, well founded in fact.’ Indeed, at least one diagnostic study has been carried out on Creseid’s condition, suggesting that the poem provides a symptomatic delineation of venereal syphilis. Yet, in spite of critical assumptions to the contrary, the association between lepra and luxuria is hardly explicit in the Testament.
However, it would seem that Creseid’s leprosy is divine punishment for her blasphemous heterodoxy. Having being abandoned by Diomeid, ‘lustie Creisseid’ (69) was reputed by some to enter ‘the court, commoun’ (77). The charge carries an implicit association with sexual laxity and the suggestion of prostitution and may account for her ‘wraikfull sentence’ (329) of leprosy. Yet we must also note that previously, ‘Cresseid, hevie in hir intent, | Into the kirk wald not hir self present’ (116-17); she continues to rail against the gods and eventually falls into ‘ane extasie’ (141). Cupid’s discourse suggests that it was Cresseid’s blasphemy, as opposed to the taint of some previous lechery, which caused her leprosy: ‘With sclander and defame injurious: | Thus hir leving unclene and lecherous’ (284-5). The implication is that the generic condition of leprosy itself rather than her supposed past renders her lecherous, and, perhaps, a heretic. This seems to be Cresseid’s own belief: ‘My blaspheming now have I bocht full deir’ (354).
A scriptural precedent for the connection between blasphemy and leprosy is the figure of King Uzziah of Judah (2 Chronicles 26: 16-20), and Miriam was smitten with leprosy for opposing the authority of Moses (Numbers 12: 5-15), which was also interpreted as blasphemy. Throughout the middle ages popular heresiology associated the Jewish people with the emblematic disease of leprosy as well as the more traditional metaphoric condition of caecitas. During the middle ages the charge that the Jews were infected with the plaga leprae was extended to include Christian heretics. As Moore points out: ‘For all imaginative purposes heretics, Jews and lepers were interchangeable … they presented the same threat: through them the Devil was at work to subvert the Christian order and bring the world to chaos.’ Indeed, the Jewish tradition of biblical commentary was invoked by Nicholas of Lyra in support of this claim. Commenting on Leviticus 13: 46 and 14: 4, Rashi specifically states that leprosy ‘comes as a punishment for slander’. This aetiology is reflected in Nicolas’s highly influential interpretation of the disease as the mendacious doctrine of heretics in matters of faith and morals, which gained wide currency in the later middle ages, and may have been known to Henryson.
The explicit of Malory’s Book of Sir Tristram introduces ‘the noble tale off the Sankegreall, whych called ys the holy vessell and the sygnyfycacion of blyssed bloode off oure Lorde Jesu Cryste’. Here he places a particular stress on the sanguis preciosus analogous to contemporary preoccupations in the visual arts. We note the emergence of the motif of the Man of Sorrows in a eucharistic context. This pietistic conception of the naked, suffering God-man and His blood, which flows into a chalice, probably stems from the eucharistically orientated cult of the sanguis preciosus in the fifteenth century. This cult was institutionalized in shrines at several locations on the Continent and, more importantly, in England. Indeed, Malory’s conception of the grail reflects this emphasis on the awe-inspiring and polysemous properties of blood. He read into his vessel religious concepts, which although precious and significant to him, were not authentic to the symbol in the Queste. His conception of the grail as calix sanctus, symbol of the sanguis preciosus, differs considerably from his source. This divergence is apparent from the grail’s initial epiphany at Camelot. The shifting image of the Queste becomes in Malory a constant image of the Mass cup filled with Christ’s blood, which has the power to feed and heal. Malory’s vessel is an explicit depiction of the calix sanctus, divorced from its liturgical context and carried in procession as a devotional object. For Malory, ‘la verité del Saint Graal’, though veiled and inaccessible, is a known truth; it is the Real Presence in the Eucharist sub utraque specie, and needs no further explication. As a late fifteenth-century layman, the Mass cup was denied to him and thus the peculiar awe and reverence which he ascribes to the grail as vessel and symbol of the sanguis preciosus.
The grail’s miraculous, restorative power is also central to Malory’s treatment of the Gaste Chapele episode. The miraculous restoration of the Knight of the Litter is by direct contact with the grail, inconceivable in the Queste. In kissing and touching the sacred vessel, he exercises a privilege which had become exclusive to the priesthood by the fifteenth century. It recalls the eucharistic visions of those lay suppliants of the late middle ages, particularly women, who were in their daily lives denied the chalice, yet by this means claimed roles otherwise prohibited to them. The eucharistic context of the knight’s experience is confirmed by his invocation, ‘Fayre swete Lord whych ys here within the holy vessell.’ Several critics have read this as an affirmation of transubstantiation, but the words, ‘take hede unto me, that I may be hole of thys malody!’ associates them with the Eucharist’s restorative function and popular belief in the healing powers of the sanguis preciosus. The chalice’s healing powers are reaffirmed by the knight’s exclamation, ‘Thorow the holy vessell I am heled.’ These ejaculations are not in the Queste and this association of the grail with healing persists throughout Malory. The blood from the lance is used by Galahad to heal the Maimed King, as foretold in the Booke of Balyne in a passage which identifies it with the sanguis preciosus. Cognate are the healing of Percival and Ector near the end of the Tristram, and the healing of Lancelot himself, which resembles that of the Knight of the Litter. This emphasis on healing recalls the miraculous powers ascribed to the relics of the sanguis preciosus at Westminster, at Ashridge in Buckinghamshire, and particularly at Hailes in Gloucestershire.
The restorative function of actual communion is reaffirmed by the eucharistic miracle experienced by the twelve grail knights at Corbenic, which occurs at the major elevation of the grail ritual, celebrated by the heavenly bishop Joseph. Although the liturgical and theological nuances of the ceremonial that accompanied it in the Queste have been distorted in Malory’s version, the eucharistic miracle itself remains intact: ‘Than loked they and saw a man com oute of the holy vessell that had all the sygnes of the Passion of Jesu Cryste bledynge all opynly.’ This description may be compared to the contemporary motif of the Eucharistic Man of Sorrows, which is relevant to Malory’s concept of the grail, for its special significance is that of the living Christ who actively gives his blood. The figure of Christ makes a solemn declaration of intent to His knights: ‘I woll no lenger cover me frome you, but ye shall se now a parte of my secretes and of my hydde thynges.’ For Malory ‘my secretes’ and ‘my hydde thynges’ indicate the Eucharist simpliciter. Yet the departure from Arthur’s realm of that thing called the grail cannot be synonymous with the withdrawal of the Eucharist. If it were, Lancelot would have died in the Morte Arthur ‘unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d’, as he did not. Rather, Arthur’s people will be disinherited of their most precious relic and its golden reliquary, the prototypal Mass cup, itself a relic. For Malory, the grail is not only the authentic vessel of the cena Domini, but also of the sanguis preciosus preserved in it since the Deposition, and its lamentable, albeit inevitable, departure from earth is treated with due solemnity in the tale that he ‘cronycled for one of the trewyst and of the holyest that ys in thys worlde’.